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Part II - International Advocacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2024

Lydia Walker
Affiliation:
Ohio State University

Summary

Type
Chapter
Information
States-in-Waiting
A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization
, pp. 83 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

Map 3.1 Decolonizing Southern Africa, c. 1960–1964.

Map by Geoffrey Wallace

3 The Anti-Algiers

In December 1960, the same month that the United Nations General Assembly declared national self-determination an international norm, Reverend Michael Scott and Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) met for a conference at Gandhigram Ashram in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu), India. Although Scott and JP did not agree on certain issues – such as the demands of Nagaland nationalist claimants within India – they both supported anticolonial nationalism across much of the decolonizing world and were committed proponents of non-violent political action. The Gandhigram Ashram conference was hosted by War Resister’s International, the flagship organization of the international peace movement, of which JP and Scott were key members.

The legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Indian national liberation had brought the international peace movement to India: India as a model for peaceful national liberation, India with its political philosophy of “peaceful coexistence,”Footnote 1 and India as a postcolonial state with its own violent divisions served as a source of inspiration, credibility, and contestation for global pacifists. Gandhigram was War Resisters’ International’s first conference in the decolonizing world – emphasizing that the international peace movement was turning its attention to the challenges of war and peace in those regions. The conference agenda focused on the Algerian war of independence from France; the Sub-Saharan African region of Katanga’s secession from newly independent Congo-Leopoldville; and the gathering confrontations facing the Indian government both on the Sino-Indian borders and over Goa, a Portuguese-held territory on India’s western coast. A year later, in 1961, India annexed Goa, ending European empire on the South Asian subcontinent.Footnote 2 The following year, in 1962, India and China went to war over their contested Himalayan borderlands. Wars of decolonization loomed on the horizon for the global pacifist movement.

JP spoke at the Gandhigram conference, closing his address with a call for a new organization – the World Peace Brigade – to intervene in modes that the United Nations as a bureaucratic, state-centric institution could not. To carry out this scheme, he envisioned the brigade as an international civil society organization that would send peace activists to intervene nonviolently in confrontations between states, empires, and nationalist movements. He stated, “It would have been interesting to watch the action of an unarmed force in the Congo. The situation in that unfortunate land would have been quite different and the UN might have succeeded by now in its mission of peace.”Footnote 3 JP pushed his audience to shift from pacifism as an abstention from violence, to nonviolent confrontation that actively sought to challenge the use of force. He asked his audience to consider violence in the decolonizing world as ground zero for the international peace movement and to see discrete violent flashpoints inside and outside India as part of a global pattern.

But just as freedom was never won free of struggle, the pursuit of peace could not be peaceful – a dichotomy captured in the term “peace brigade.” The effectiveness of Gandhian nonviolent mobilization, eventually called a peace army, or Shanti Sena, had relied on the threat of violence;Footnote 4 Martin Luther King’s calls for nonviolent protest to end racial inequality in the United States worked in part because of the juxtaposition provided by Malcolm X’s insistence on achieving that goal “by any means necessary”; and the World Peace Brigade that JP called for sought to create a peace force in order to force peace. The concept of a nonviolent force had its roots in Gandhi’s early-twentieth-century activism in South Africa, also the point of origin for connections between Indian national liberation, anticolonial struggle in Southern Africa, and the tactic of using nonviolent civil disobedience to generate international attention.Footnote 5 The seemingly nonviolent character of the mainstream Indian independence movement became a site of (and an ideal for) transnational advocacy.Footnote 6

The World Peace Brigade

In January 1962, a year after the Gandhigram conference ended – a year that saw intense planning by the American Quaker Arlo Tatum, seconded from War Resisters’ International – the World Peace Brigade was officially launched. Modeled on Gandhi’s peace army and composed of people from various liberation, disarmament, human rights, and civil rights groups across the world, the Brigade was founded as an organization that would support anticolonial struggles through nonviolent means. Its planners chose a Quaker high school in sleepy, provincial Brummana, Lebanon, for the organization’s founding conference, because of its propinquity to the Israel–Palestine dispute, and because Israelis could be permitted entry.

Conference attendees structured the Brigade to have three regional councils, or headquarters: in North America (New York), Europe (London, at the War Resisters’ International office), and Asia (Rajghat, Varanasi, India); symptomatic of some of the organization’s eventual challenges, there was no African regional council. Each regional council had a different religious slant: Hindu/Sarvodaya (Asia), Anglican (Europe), and American Friends/Quaker (North America). The Brigade’s central council included a chairperson from each region as well as individual Quakers, Sarvodaya workers, pacifists, and US civil rights and anti–nuclear weapons activists.Footnote 7 The organization combined Americans, Britons, and Indians, some of whom worked on a host of sometimes religiously oriented pacifist causes, and some of whom had been involved in the Indian independence struggle either directly – as nationalist claimants – or as international advocates. JP Narayan, Reverend Michael Scott, and A. J. Muste (a US clergyman active in the peace, labor, and civil rights movements) formed the Brigade’s leadership; listed as advisors on the organization’s letterhead were Martin Luther King; Kenneth Kaunda, leader of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) of Northern Rhodesia and the first president of an independent Zambia; Julius Nyerere, prime minister of Tanganyika and later president of Tanzania, its successor state; and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The World Peace Brigade’s Asia office shared its leadership and mailing address with the Indian Sarvodaya movement. A concept that Gandhi developed, sarvodaya (“universal uplift” or “well-being of all”) celebrated manual labor, the voluntary equal distribution of wealth, and small-scale self-sufficient communities.Footnote 8 After Indian independence (1947) and Gandhi’s death (1948), the idea of sarvodaya transformed into the Sarvodaya movement, which aimed to rectify social, economic, and political injustices within India – an Indian civil rights movement that remained outside of government or electoral politics and espoused nonviolence and volunteerism as an operating method and a source of legitimacy. JP Narayan was one of its main leaders.Footnote 9 The Brigade was conceived as an internationally scaled Sarvodaya movement, growing out of the transnational connections between activists in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere who had supported Gandhi.Footnote 10 While many of the pre-1947 solidarities between the Indian nationalists who became the governing elite of independent India and their US and European colleagues had eroded by the 1950s and early 1960s, peace activists’ affinities with Indians outside government in the Sarvodaya movement remained.Footnote 11

The Brigade stressed the importance of the individual in service of “peace action.” As Albert Bigelow, an antinuclear activist wrote in his thoughts on the Brigade’s founding conference, “Men can be human, responsible, autonomous … [in places] precisely at the point of tension of war.”Footnote 12 As individuals, Brigade members would provide “pilot examples” and bear “prophetic witness” to the unrest of decolonization.Footnote 13 The Brigade would define, support, and train up the “right” kind of anticolonial nationalist leadership to shift nationalism into the correct political form (democratic self-rule, with no nationalization of industry or expulsion of settler-colonial or diaspora communities) through nonviolent methods. It vouched for the peaceful yet legitimately nationalist credentials of its chosen protégés in the international media and at the United Nations.

Members of the World Peace Brigade, and the overlapping circles of anticolonial nationalist and pacifist activism in which its participants were embedded, formed a transnational advocacy network.Footnote 14 These networks, motivated by shared values, were loosely organized spheres of nongovernmental activism that crossed national borders. Anticolonialists have often operated transnationally, both before and after the Second World War.Footnote 15 Such networks have allowed them access to spheres of influence that remained closed to them within their colonized country. Understandings of these anticolonial transnational networks generally focus on solidarities between colonized and formerly colonized or otherwise disenfranchised peoples; these are often termed “South–South” connections.Footnote 16

However, the Brigade and the wider community of activism in which it operated differed from many of these networks in two key ways: First, its membership predominantly came from a departing imperial colonizer (Britain), rising indirect empire (the United States), and new postcolonial state (India), not from active anticolonial nationalist movements. Second, while Indians, along with some African American civil rights activists, played crucial roles in terms of leadership, membership, and inspiration, the Brigade and its network drew much of their finances as well as significant portions of their leadership and membership from white allies – to use ahistorical language. Advocates from the Brigade community derived their prestige and influence from the various movements to which they belonged, as well as their degree of proximity to spheres of political power that lay within (or were allied with) the United States during the Cold War.

In this way, the Brigade was a First World construction – built upon the geopolitical framework after the Second World War that divided the world into those who supported or were backed by the United States, those who supported or were backed by the Second World of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and those in the postcolonial or decolonizing “Third World.”Footnote 17 Alongside its First World orientation, the Brigade set out to find ways to address violence in the decolonizing Third World. The analytical disconnect between its First World alignment and its Third World mission undermined the Brigade’s neutral peace politics, which presented an alternative to the prospect of (what it perceived to be) uncontrolled, violent, and potentially communist-supported national liberation.

Leadership: Muste, Narayan, Scott

The structure of the World Peace Brigade prioritized the individual advocate – particularly the charismatic individual of moral stature – as the solution to international problems of war, violence, disenfranchisement, and dependency. When pondering Katanga’s secession from Congo-Leopoldville in Sub-Saharan Africa, JP’s wife and colleague, Asha Devi, queried what she herself could do if she were parachuted into the midst of the Congo Crisis.Footnote 18 Devi proposed that a nationally unaffiliated person of Gandhian training and discipline, dropped into a conflict zone, might succeed in negotiating between opposing parties in a situation that stymied official diplomacy.

The Brigade was a collection of individuals who shared this belief. Its three chairmen (Figure 3.1) – A. J. Muste (1885–1967); J. P. Narayan (1902–1979); and Michael Scott (1907–1983) – were founders, board members, and supporters of multiple activist organizations and possessed moral clout among their colleagues and followers. They stood at the center of the international peace movement, espoused nonviolent interventionism, and were activists for causes specific to the country in which they held citizenship. In addition, they had leadership roles in faith communities that were nationally oriented but had international followings.

Figure 3.1

(a) A. J. Muste, 1965;

(b) Jayaprakash Narayan, 1975;

(c) Michael Scott (center) with Bertrand Russell, 1961.

Getty Images

Abraham Johannes Muste chaired the Brigade’s North American Regional Council. Muste was an ordained Protestant minister and had worked for organized labor in the United States throughout the 1930s. In 1940, he became a leader of US Christian pacifism, heading the Fellowship for Reconciliation and the Institute for the Rights of Man, among other Quaker-oriented organizations.Footnote 19 He was active in the US civil rights movement and mentored the African American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (also a Quaker) and pan-Africanist Bill Sutherland, who both joined the World Peace Brigade.Footnote 20 Muste was a brilliant administrator and accomplished fundraiser, able to shift between roles as organizational figurehead and éminence grise. He skillfully moderated the internecine conflicts endemic to voluntary associations run on shoestring budgets, and he tapped US philanthropists to fund his enterprises. He died in 1967, a few months after his visit to and deportation from South Vietnam (and his meeting with North Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi) in protest of the United States’ war against that country.

Muste, along with George Houser (also a Protestant minister) of the American Committee on Africa, an anti-apartheid advocacy organization, was one of the few on the antiwar American left who could get along well both with elements of the US Democratic Party establishment – often donors to their organizations – and with the growing, more radical New Left. Such activists were quiet diplomats who did not mind ceding prime billing to let the claimants they supported take center stage. They belonged to a tradition of Protestant activism known and perceived as safe by more establishment types,Footnote 21 and they were willing to suffer physical and financial discomfort in pursuit of their goals. For example, Houser and colleagues would travel across the United States by car, at times sleeping in it overnight, singing hymns during the day and road-tripping from donor meetings to college campus speeches.Footnote 22

In the late 1950s, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), chair of the Brigade’s Asian Regional Council, had such a substantial international profile that many in the US Department of State assumed that he would be Nehru’s successor as Indian prime minister, a belief based more on JP’s prestige abroad than on political dynamics within India.Footnote 23 JP was deeply invested in Indian domestic development, the Sarvodaya movement, and the Bhoodan movement for voluntary land reform.Footnote 24 He lent his prestige to certain nationalists (particularly Tanganyika/Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Northern Rhodesia/Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta) and attempted to tap into South Asian diaspora communities in Southern and Eastern Africa for logistical and popular support.Footnote 25 As the figurehead for the student-led “JP movement,” he emerged as an opponent of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi when she suspended civil liberties and cancelled elections during the Indian Emergency (1975–1977).Footnote 26 JP had a track record of ambiguous support for the political grievances of Kashmir, Tibet, and Nagaland.Footnote 27 He expressed this ambiguity by deliberately avoiding giving direct answers to binary political questions; he had the gift – at times a curse – of straddling opposing positions. Sometimes this made him an ideally placed negotiator while, at other times, he was in danger of alienating his own side.

The chair of the Brigade’s European Regional Council, Michael Scott, an Anglican clergyman, first came to India in the 1930s as an undercover courier for the Communist Party, on the staff of the Bishop of Bombay. His overarching concern for political justice had bridged his theology and communist sympathies. After the Second World War he grew disillusioned with Stalinism and took a posting to Johannesburg, giving himself the first-hand experience he used when he testified on behalf of India at the UN’s Fourth Committee on Colonialism hearings on South Africa’s restrictive 1946 Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Act, which limited where South Asians could own property in South Africa. By 1960, Scott was a veteran UN petitioner, speaking nearly annually on behalf of the rights of the Herero people of South West Africa at the UN Committee on South West Africa, sometimes with the logistical support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an African American civil rights organization.Footnote 28

Scott was deeply concerned with the fates of minority peoples within new postcolonial states and tacked some unofficial diplomacy onto his visit to the War Resisters’ International Gandhigram conference, held in India in December 1960–January 1961. Passing through Delhi right before and after the conference, Scott talked with Prime Minister Nehru about national independence for the Naga people in India’s Northeast, and the future of their exiled leader, Angami Zapu Phizo, who was at that time ensconced at Scott’s London-based advocacy organization, the Africa Bureau. The International Friends (Quaker) Centre in North Delhi had agreed to serve as a neutral, private ground for Scott and Nehru’s conversation since Scott had told Indian Quakers that “he was not sponsoring Phizo’s claim, … only his right for a chance to talk with his own people” and return to India.Footnote 29 Most importantly, Nehru’s own government was not privy to the content or occurrence of these secret meetings until Nehru himself chose to divulge them in a January 1961 press conference.Footnote 30

The fact that Scott, a non-Indian and private British citizen, could hold secret negotiations with the prime minister of India on a thorny diplomatic matter involving the latter’s country indicates that Scott – along with certain other leaders of the international peace movement – was held in great respect by and had sway with particular top government officials. These off-the-record, unofficial meetings also showed how international civil society spaces such as the Friends Center facilitated unofficial diplomacy and highlighted the involvement of the Friends Service Committee. Many Quakers had been active participants and advocates for the Indian independence movement; in the 1960s, some turned to the US civil rights movement and to the unfinished business of decolonization, such as the place of minority peoples within newly independent nation-states.

The lives and work of Muste, JP, and Scott typify how a well-placed, well-connected individual could act as an iconic figure metonymic of a larger cause, as a link between different realms of politics, and as a gatekeeper on behalf of those who lacked the ability or access to represent themselves in circles of power. Each stood at the center of liberal, anticommunist civil society activism within his own country, and each was often more practical, even more expedient, than his ideological goals might imply. They were moralists who functioned with more finesse and ability as individuals than they did within the organization they cofounded, the World Peace Brigade. They operated within the interstices, the unregulated spaces, of the United Nations as both a set of bureaucracies and as a system of international order, because they saw the institution as inadequately addressing the process of decolonization. However, when the Brigade was established as an organization, its weaknesses were revealed: lack of money, staffed by volunteers with day jobs, and led by unofficial politicians with many and varied – and at times conflicting – ideological commitments.

The Africa Freedom Action Project

February 1962 to February 1963 saw intense activity by Brigade members. They conducted seminars in civil disobedience in Dar es Salaam and testified to the UN Special Committee of 17 on Decolonization concerning Katanga’s secession from the former Belgian Congo, which they viewed as an illegitimate, neoimperial, rather than national, claim because of Katanga’s direct links to Western multinational mining interests. Brigade members were also some of the few non-Africans to attend conferences sponsored by the Pan-African Freedom Movement of Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa (PAFMEC[S]A) and to consult with African nationalist leaders there. In addition to these activities, one of their most significant undertakings was their launch of the African Action Freedom Project in East Africa. This project included a planned march from Tanganyika to Northern Rhodesia, with Northern Rhodesian/Zambian nationalist leader Kenneth Kaunda, to help generate international attention and support for the Zambian independence movement.Footnote 31

In the early 1960s, the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, was an obvious point of entry for a host of international actors who sought to work with the forces of national liberation.Footnote 32 It had been a hub for global exchange and connection since the nineteenth century.Footnote 33 Tanganyika had a newly independent government led by Prime Minister Julius Nyerere – a charismatic leader, anticolonialist, and political thinker with a growing African and international profile.Footnote 34 The city itself had an increasingly vibrant university and cultural sensibility.Footnote 35 It also had relative geographic propinquity to the landlocked “decolonization hot spots” of Katanga and the Rhodesias. A variety of intelligence agencies operating in the city competed with each other to recruit informants among nationalist movements, university students, and the general population.Footnote 36

All these characteristics made Dar es Salaam an ideal site for the World Peace Brigade’s work of transforming anticolonial nationalist movements into peaceful, anticommunist, postcolonial states – and of building an international civil society nonviolent militia: a civitia.Footnote 37 In early 1962, the Brigade launched the Africa Freedom Action Project with the aim of aiding the breakup of the white-ruled Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi). At first, Michael Scott was the primary project leader. After he left Dar es Salaam in summer 1962, Bill Sutherland assumed leadership of the project.

Dar es Salaam figured as the project’s headquarters for supporting and training anticolonial nationalists in nonviolent civil disobedience of the type used by Gandhi and the US civil rights movement. Project participants aimed to make the city what they termed the “anti-Algiers,” alluding to the city’s Arabic name (“Abode of Peace”) and contrasting the Brigade’s training of anticolonial nationalists in Gandhian civil disobedience to the violence of Algerian decolonization and the new Algerian government’s military training for other national liberation movements.Footnote 38 Project members saw themselves as “nonviolent technicians” who would organize and teach Africans “how to be effective” on a mass march.Footnote 39 They led training programs and held rallies – featuring themselves and regional nationalist leaders – of around five thousand people in Dar es Salaam and of almost ten thousand at Mbeya, in southwest Tanganyika.

Absent from the Brigade’s planning was its ideological competition – the many African anticolonial nationalist guerrilla camps that stood on the outskirts of the city.Footnote 40 The leadership of Namibian, Mozambican, Zambian, Zimbabwean, and South African anticolonial nationalists, either based in or repeatedly passing through Dar es Salaam, sought succor and support from a range of individuals attached to governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations, including members of the World Peace Brigade.Footnote 41 These nationalists had an assortment of advocates from whom to draw backing, as well as actual paramilitary training camps on the doorstep of Dar es Salaam. The “Algerian model” encircled the anti-Algiers.

One of the few African leaders who actively engaged with the Africa Freedom Action Project was the Northern Rhodesian/Zambian nationalist Kenneth Kaunda. In early February 1962, Kaunda met Bayard Rustin, Bill Sutherland, and Michael Scott in Addis Ababa at the Fourth PAFMEC(S)A Conference.Footnote 42 There, the Brigade members pitched the Freedom Action Project to Kaunda as a nonviolent civil-disobedience campaign in support of Zambian independence; as its first endeavor, the project planned a march from Mbeya (near the Tanganyika–Northern Rhodesia border) into Northern Rhodesia. This march would spearhead a six-month general strike that Kaunda planned to launch against the British colonial state that governed Northern Rhodesia. The threatened strike and march were tools to pressure British colonial authorities, hastening their withdrawal by making them view Zambian independence more favorably compared to the rising costs of governing. Kaunda supported the Brigade’s scheme, announcing that the proposed march would be equipped with bibles, not guns – thus linking the endeavor to the faith-based peace politics of the Brigade community rather than to the revolutionary nationalism of other liberation movements.Footnote 43

An April 1962 profile of Kaunda in the New York Times emphasized his commitment to multiracialism and “his record for keeping hot-headed supporters under control.”Footnote 44 The US “paper of record” described Kaunda as a “son of a missionary” and a “disciple of Gandhi,” who neither drank nor smoked and who emulated Abraham Lincoln. The Times portrayed the Northern Rhodesian leader as the “right” kind of anticolonial nationalist, who channeled the fervor of his “hot-headed” supporters through personal discipline and a sensibility aligned with that of the Gandhian World Peace Brigade. Kaunda had traveled to the United States twice in the previous two years, as the guest of George Houser’s American Committee on Africa (a member of the Brigade community), where he made a positive impression on John F. Kennedy and garnered the endorsement of Life magazine as “a patriotic practitioner of democracy” and a “soft-spoken believer in non-violence.”Footnote 45 There was a history of multiracial, self-proclaimed “liberal” organizing in colonial Northern Rhodesia that Kaunda may not have directly espoused but from which he benefited as he positioned himself as the internationally recognized, safely religious, peaceful, and anticommunist leader of an independent Zambia.Footnote 46

As the British-colonial Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland unraveled into white supremist and Black majority-ruled states against the background of racial and Cold War politics, Kenneth Kaunda was attempting to navigate that complicated political terrain.Footnote 47 The future of the Rhodesias, whether as white-ruled British dominions or as independent postcolonial states or as something in between, was seemingly up for grabs in the early 1960s.Footnote 48 White-settler colonials could rely on personal connections within the British government to make their case for an Australia in the Southern African Copperbelt. Black African leaders, on the other hand, lacking these direct connections, had to demonstrate from afar their regional popularity and their ability to manage their constituents.Footnote 49 In his push for Zambian independence, Kaunda had to show the British two things: that the anticolonial movement was of sufficient strength for London to take it seriously, and that he could speak for and manage Northern Rhodesian anticolonial nationalism. Kaunda needed to present anticolonial nationalism as dangerous – but not too dangerous.

In early 1962, before Zambian independence, it was therefore opportune – in terms of both Kaunda’s goals and peace advocacy – for the Brigade to help Kaunda with this balancing act by grabbing local and international headlines through its planned march into Northern Rhodesia, designed to increase the “right” kind of pressure on the British: nonviolent, anticommunist, seemingly democratic-participatory.Footnote 50 Kaunda’s pre-independence authority rested on his skillful embodiment of the “correct” form of anticolonial nationalism as a “principled non-violent Christian leader” with legitimate anticolonial nationalist credentials: a leader whom Western governments and multinational mining corporations could consider “reasonable” and safe for foreign investment.Footnote 51

By autumn of that year, however, Kaunda no longer needed the support of the Brigade: the Northern Rhodesian election allowed his United National Independence Party (UNIP) to form a coalition government and enter formal politics. The election empowered Northern Rhodesian nationalists and undermined the purpose of the Africa Freedom Action Project’s work in that region. As Kaunda became the presumptive leader of a likely independent Zambia, his need for the Brigade evaporated. He had used the agitation over its planned peace march as leverage while constitutional proposals for Northern Rhodesia were debated in London. However, when Britain began to negotiate with him seriously about a political transition toward an independent state, he could prioritize his much-needed connections with investors – mining companies and development organizations – over those with peace activists. At the last minute, he pulled the plug on the proposed march (and the strike) as a gesture of good faith to London.Footnote 52

Members of the World Peace Brigade had functioned as important gatekeepers for Kaunda, setting up meetings for him with government officials and investors, who often sat on the board of development or advocacy organizations, or both.Footnote 53 The gatekeeper’s job was to open metaphorical gates and forward a nationalist claim on to the next, more powerful advocate. Brigade members’ effectiveness in making these connections for Kaunda played a role in Kaunda’s successful bid for national leadership and Zambian independence. Yet that same success caused Kaunda to withdrawal from the Africa Freedom Action Project, thereby undermining the Brigade’s work in East Africa.

Despite its original utility for Kaunda, the Brigade’s Africa Freedom Action Project in Dar es Salaam was not able to find another African nationalist leader interested in its services. Losing momentum, the project shut down after a year (in 1963), as its leadership’s focus shifted toward other endeavors. Without a concrete aim after Kaunda lost interest, in September 1962 Bill Sutherland, de facto project leader after Scott left in summer 1962, fantasized about a march to South West Africa – either a land march from Tanganyika or a “sea movement” from Congo-Leopoldville – that would generate international attention for both anticolonial nationalist liberation in Southern Africa and the Africa Freedom Action Project.Footnote 54 But just four months later, at the start of the new year, a worn-out Sutherland dropped Scott a note one night: “Since the generator is not working at the moment and water is not being pumped properly from the well, [I am] getting the hell out of here. I may continue writing letters in some bar; although I’m somewhat on the wagon.”Footnote 55

“Liberalist” Internationalism and Its Weaknesses

Shortly afterward, in February 1963, the Brigade – mired in internal ideological disagreement, lacking nationalist backing, and losing money – closed the Africa Freedom Action Project. Bill Sutherland wrote to A. J. Muste about its demise:

It is our failure to come up with a dramatic and imaginative program for South Rhodesia, South West Africa, Mozambique or any other place which excludes us. If a tried and able group of Afro-Americans from the Birmingham scene could be brought over here with strategists like Bayard [Rustin] … I’m sure the Southern Africans, Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique – even [South West African People’s Organization leader Sam] Nujoma would listen. It’s just that terrorism and guerrilla warfare are the only methods which appear relevant to the Southern African scene that Julius [Nyerere] falls into step with [Algerian president Ahmed] Ben Bella.”Footnote 56

Sutherland highlighted the failure of the Brigade’s twin aims: internationalizing the US civil rights movement and making Dar es Salaam a center for nonviolent anticolonial struggle – the metaphorical anti-Algiers. The inadequate number of US civil rights activists was his first explanation for the collapse of the anti-Algiers. His second was “that terrorism and guerrilla warfare [were] the only methods which appear relevant” to anticolonial nationalist movements.

Muste’s own epitaph for the project blamed its shortcomings in part on Brigade leadership, at the level of the individual – specifically, Scott’s abandonment and Sutherland’s drinking. He also felt, as he wrote in a letter (likely in 1963), that the demise of the project was part of the growing pains for a new type of politics: “Ventures of this kind are necessarily experimental in nature.”Footnote 57 Muste alluded to the Brigade’s aim to “bear prophetic witness” to political change rather than engineer that change itself. This aim encapsulated the conundrum of advocacy, which could disempower – or even supplant – its cause if advocacy ended up exceeding the strength and influence of the cause on whose behalf it worked.

A 1962 article by Barbara Deming in Muste’s Liberation magazine, written before the Africa Freedom Action Project dissolved, gave the most thorough account of the Brigade’s aims while simultaneously indicating the deeper flaws in the organization.Footnote 58 A prominent feminist, pacifist, attendee at the Brigade’s founding conference, and close colleague of the Brigade community, Deming was an excellent writer and theorist of nonviolent sociopolitical change. Her tagline for the Brigade was “to revolutionize the concept of revolution.” She captured the tension at the heart of the Brigade’s attempt to be an international “people’s movement” whose membership did not belong to the peoples it sought to liberate. She opened her piece with the image of a cluster of Brigade members (Americans, Indians, and Europeans) “bent over a map weighing the possibilities of a trek by an international team into some part of Black Africa to set up a non-violent training center there, and to assist the African leaders in their struggle for self-determination.”Footnote 59 The imperial echoes of Deming’s words are hard to ignore: non-Africans pouring over a map of “some part of Black Africa,” planning their expedition. She closed with a caveat: “Before the African project could be definite, there had of course to be consultations with independence leaders there.”Footnote 60 Revealingly, as noted earlier, the World Peace Brigade had no regional council for the African continent or African leadership.

In 1960, two years before the Brigade launched the Africa Freedom Action Project, George Loft, the American Friends Service Committee representative in Salisbury, Rhodesia, met with the governor of Northern Rhodesia to discuss a project on the “Christian approach to the issues the Federation will face in 1960.”Footnote 61 Loft pleaded for the organized participation of anticolonial nationalist leaders “such as Kenneth Kaunda.” “We tend to forget,” he argued, “that most of our African leadership has come through some phase of Christian mission work; it would be well for them to be reminded of their Christian heritage and responsibilities; it would be equally desirable to remind the European community at large that the African leaders have such a heritage.”Footnote 62

Loft’s successor, Lyle Tatum, who took up his post as the Friends Service Committee’s Salisbury, Rhodesia, representative later in 1960, was the brother of the founding secretary of the World Peace Brigade, Arlo Tatum. Lyle decided to pursue a faster and more personal integrationist policy than had Loft, and invited Black Africans into his rented home in a white-only Salisbury neighborhood. Facing eviction for having done so, Lyle Tatum circulated a poll among his neighbors in October, seeking textual evidence of their views on the matter.Footnote 63 Some respondents said that they had no objection as long as gatherings were personal rather than political and guests “behave themselves in a civilized and orderly manner.” Others emphasized how long they had been in Rhodesia: “27 years,” an “old Rhodesian,” “three generations in Rhodesia,” and said that multiracialism was doomed to failure – look at Congo – and that Lyle Tatum should turn his attention to the American South.Footnote 64 The Tatum family shifted houses and organized a series of community development projects, building homes, schools, and gardens with a staff of multiracial volunteers.

Reading through the responses made Lyle more sympathetic to the point of view of his segregationist neighbors. In a July 1962 letter to Muste and Sutherland (responding to one that Muste had written to Lyle in April), Lyle criticized the Brigade’s closeness with Kaunda’s UNIP party, arguing that it corrupted the Brigade’s attempt to craft a reputation for itself as an honest broker for the region’s conflicts. In particular, he denounced JP’s, Sutherland’s, and Scott’s testimony before the UN:

There was nothing in the World Peace Brigade’s testimony which was anything like evidence under US law. Most of it was hearsay, and the information … was not original and could have been submitted by UNIP … I feel there is a heady wine of high places about [the] World Peace Brigade that needs watching – UN testimony, prime ministers as friends and patrons, etc. It is easy to get led down the primrose path of this heady wine. The World Peace Brigade is not and cannot be number one with any of these people, even Kaunda.Footnote 65

Beyond the issue of whether the Brigade, as organized, should advocate for multiracial societies in specific African territories, Lyle’s disapproval addressed issues inherent in an international organization taking defined nationalist stances. At what point would it cease to be an independent agent? What loyalty would nationalist elites have toward a collection of underfunded idealists once they had access to development assistance and the foreign policy representatives of actual countries? For instance, although Julius Nyerere had invited the Brigade to Dar es Salaam, he had more interest in signing agreements with existent governments than with Sutherland and Muste. Further, Lyle warned, “even Kaunda” – at that time, in the early 1960s, still fighting for Zambia’s recognition – would lose interest at some point in working with the Brigade. The Brigade was useful to the leader of a nationalist movement who lacked official recognition but not so much to a president or prime minister of an actual state.

Continuing in the same letter with his denunciations of the Brigade’s activities, Lyle suggested the elimination of the words “settler,” “native,” and “imperialism” from Brigade literature, as they “immediately stamp the political orientation of the material, foreclose readership outside of the pro-nationalist groups, and antagonize those with whom we seek reconciliation.”Footnote 66 Lyle’s discomfort with terminology that highlighted racial political hierarchies and preference for words like “partnership” marked a turn from antiracism, as Muste wrote in his stinging April 1962 letter to Lyle: “Issues are often controversial precisely because they matter, they confront people with decisions they do not want to make. ‘Partnership’ became a bad word because it was used for what amounted to phony partnership.”Footnote 67

Lyle’s attempt to view his white Rhodesian neighbors as legitimately African was part of a broader conversation at the time about whether European settlers in Southern Africa were African or European.Footnote 68 This conversation paralleled that of France around Algerian independence and the place of the pied noir – the white-settler population, often of Italian and Spanish descent, who were “repatriated” to France following Algerian independence.Footnote 69 It also resonated with the question of Indian diaspora communities in South and East Africa and their political relationships with independent India and Pakistan, former European metropole, and their new postcolonial African government.Footnote 70 Where and how these groups fit within postcolonial states shifted with time and political context. However, in the run-up to independence, demonstrating “multiracialism” – inclusion of Asian and white-settler populations in a prospectively democratically (i.e., Black African majority) ruled postcolonial state – was necessary in order for an anticolonial nationalist leader to demonstrate his legitimate credentials to an international audience (and Western financial elites), as Kaunda himself knew well.

After his argument with Lyle Tatum over the Brigade’s support of Kaunda, Muste had another ideological disagreement on the Northern Rhodesia question, this time with Robert S. Steinbock, an American Quaker businessman who donated money to the American Friends Service Committee (which helped fund the Brigade) and who objected to the “direct and implicit political nature of the World Peace Brigade.”Footnote 71 Steinbock thought that the Brigade acted in “coordinate relationship with several political organizations professing and practicing extremist policies in Africa.” He drew an analogy between the Brigade’s planned march to Northern Rhodesia and US anti-immigrant fears:

AJ Muste appealed on humanitarian grounds to pacifists to support a nonviolent march from Tanganyika to help the (according to him) oppressed masses in Rhodesia. I wonder what Friends would say if, say 10,000 Mexicans were banded together and led by AJ Muste in support of some political movement in this country.

Another division within the Brigade community grew between those who believed pacifist principles should come before questions of political justice and those who did not, such as Muste and Scott. This division became a deep problem for the Brigade during its second major Third World endeavor, a planned march from New Delhi to Peking to draw international attention to the continued tensions on the contested Sino-Indian border following the 1962 war between India and China.

As these divisions indicated – between those who were pure pacifists and those who were not, between those who thought reconciliation with members of white supremist regimes might be possible and those who did not – the World Peace Brigade did not have unified positions. It was an amalgamation – a set of alliances of shared interests and affinities – rather than an integrated movement, making it difficult to characterize its politics under a single label. The Brigade also drew upon supporters who belonged to circles sympathetic to its aims but did not participate in its endeavors. Its members and sympathizers were liberal, anticommunist supporters of both anticolonial nationalism and peaceful regime-change. They drew inspiration from and were part of the political community that inspired John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, a project that overlapped in time and theme with the Brigade’s creation. Brigade members saw themselves as unarmed peacekeepers who could be seconded to the United Nations as a peace force in much the same way that countries rented out members of their own military to the UN as armed peacekeepers.Footnote 72 The UN, especially its Fourth Committee on Colonialism, which handled decolonization questions, shaped Brigade activism. Members of the Brigade served as character witnesses, testifying regularly in front of its subcommittees in support of particular anticolonial nationalists.

UN civil servants were often friends and ideological sympathizers of Brigade members and occupied a similar position on the ideological spectrum: proponents of peaceful, anticommunist (i.e., opposed to the nationalization of industry) national liberation, in the shape of an independent postcolonial state. The UN’s decolonization dilemma, exemplified by its peacekeeping difficulties in Congo, set the scene for the contentious ideological landscape confronting the Brigade. In his play Murderous Angles, Conor Cruise O’Brien, former UN special advisor to the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga as well as a friend of the Brigade community, defined “liberalists” (embodied by UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld) and “liberationists” (embodied by Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba) as ideological competitors on a mutually deadly collision course.Footnote 73 Liberalists prioritized peace and political stability over the overthrow of unjust regimes; liberationists, the opposite.

The World Peace Brigade and its overlapping circles of supporters espoused this liberalist perspective. Though some had been sympathetic to communism before Stalin and the Second World War and were labeled “communist” by their political opponents, they were no longer aligned with the political ideology. At times, the old “communist” label created difficulties for Brigade members and affiliated organizations: for instance, on account of his Communist Party past, for decades Scott’s US visa for petitioning the UN specified that he could only be present in the US within a fifty-block radius of the UN building in Turtle Bay.Footnote 74 In addition, because of his “unstable” communist past, South Africa claimed that Scott was an unreliable advocate and should not be granted hearings at the UN.Footnote 75 Furthermore, the Brigade’s American parent organizations had to repeatedly testify to their anticommunist bonafides at the US Congress’s Un-American Activities Committee as they included members who had once joined the Communist Party.Footnote 76 Yet, in spite of these allegations against the Brigade, the reality stood that its community was and remained anticommunist.

Alongside UN peacekeeping in Congo, the foreign policy of John F. Kennedy – as US senator, presidential candidate, president-elect, and eventually president – influenced the Brigade community. At first, Kennedy provided it with inspiration and potential avenues of access to political decision-making. Before becoming president, Kennedy served as the chairman of the newly created US Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs. Since the US Department of State lacked an Africa office until 1958, the subcommittee sourced its own information network. Kennedy solicited memos, speech drafts, and introductions to anticolonial nationalist leaders from a range of interested individuals and civil society organizations who were experts (e.g., elements of the Brigade community) on topics related to decolonization and Africa.Footnote 77 As a “president-in-waiting,” Kennedy made use of the transnational civil society connections that underpinned the Brigade; later on, as president with his own Department of State that now had an established Africa office and with increased needs for sensitivity and secrecy, the Kennedy team dissolved many of these civil society ties.Footnote 78

Chronicling this shift in late 1961, Winifred Courtney wrote an article on President Kennedy’s first year in office, in Africa South in Exile, an anticolonial nationalist advocacy magazine. Courtney, an American Quaker, was the UN observer for a number of religious left–oriented advocacy organizations: George Houser’s American Committee on Africa, Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She reported on UN activities to her organizations, which, in turn, circulated these reports in their publications and newsletters. She was a friend of nationalist leaders Mburumba Kerina (Namibia) and Tom Mboya (Kenya); she and her family in Westchester, New York, often hosted Scott on his visits to New York City to testify at the United Nations on behalf of Namibian nationalists (after he was allowed outside of his fifty-block radius); and she edited some of Scott’s speeches. In her article “Kennedy’s New Frontier,” Courtney highlighted the crucial difference between Kennedy as a senator versus as a president:

During the dying days of the Eisenhower Administration, John F. Kennedy seemed to understand world revolution [i.e. decolonization] remarkably well. He recognized that in the eyes of emerging peoples, the US has been all too often the defender of colonial and dictatorial oppression rather than the great bastion of freedom it fancies itself to be. This he emphasized in his Senate speech on American policy over Algeria a few years ago, which angered the French. His experience as Chairman of the Senate’s Africa Subcommittee had given him sympathetic insight into the problems of the whole continent. But the gap between opposition criticism and day-to-day practice in office is invariably wide.Footnote 79

According to Courtney, Kennedy, as president, became the prisoner “of his own ability – which after all got him elected – to ride two horses at once: The Cold War and World Development under World Law,” meaning the channeling of anticolonial nationalist movements into peaceful, anticommunist postcolonial states.Footnote 80 Courtney considered the Cold War as antithetical to this “liberalist” decolonization project: Kennedy’s flaw was that he saw the Cold War and decolonization “as a circus team, rather than as the mutually antagonistic forces that they are, bound to dump him catastrophically in the end.”Footnote 81

However, contra to Courtney’s distinction, the channeling of decolonization into peaceful, liberalist (noncommunist) states was Cold War politics. The Brigade’s conception of Dar es Salaam as the anti-Algiers aligned ideologically and analytically with the First World even though it criticized divisive United States–Soviet Union international relations. Within this First World political context, the Brigade stood at the intersection of a slew of international civil society organizations – including Quakers – that advocated for nonviolent, anticommunist political justice. But mobilizing financial provision for such advocacy required ingenuity. Funding for international civil society endeavors like the World Peace Brigade came from a patchwork of state, corporate, and foundation sources facilitated by personal connections. In India, JP asked Nehru for money, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Memorial Trust in India also funded Brigade work.Footnote 82 Individual members paid for their own travel, sometimes through personal fundraising, sometimes through the budgets of their own affiliated organizations.

Brigade members’ parent organizations – such as the Africa Bureau, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Minority Rights Group, War Resisters’ International, Friends Service Committee, among others – were often indirect recipients of CIA money intended to promote global anticommunism.Footnote 83 For instance, Scott’s Africa Bureau received financial support from the Fairfield Foundation, and JP headed the Indian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – two of the largest CIA-funded anticommunist advocacy organizations.Footnote 84 Despite this CIA support for the Brigade, vehement anticommunists within the US government and of course in Southern African settler governments denounced Brigade members as socialists, leftists, and even communists.Footnote 85 In addition, many Brigade members did not know the original source of their funding, nor did that financial support shift their goals or methods. As stated by the Times of India, if “the CIA believes that it is achieving something more than goodwill by its liberal donations, that is obviously the concern of the American tax-payer and not those of whom innocently benefit from the transaction.”Footnote 86

Still, financial connections and aid demonstrated aspects of ideological alignment – at least that elements within the CIA perceived the utility of Brigade members’ work toward supporting First World interests during decolonization. The Brigade’s anti-Algiers was a Cold War project, positioning Gandhian peaceworkers in Dar es Salaam as the political alternative to Ahmed Ben Bella’s National Liberation Front in Algeria, which did more than train anticolonial nationalists in guerrilla warfare. In 1963, with Ben Bella as president, Algeria nationalized a portion of its industry, its banking, and its media, and eliminated French land ownership.Footnote 87

Conclusion

Beginning in the 1920s, notions of a “dark” or “colored world” – W. E. B. Du Bois’s “color line” – had provided a sense of solidarity between African Americans and peoples in the colonial world engaged in nationalist struggles.Footnote 88 There was a strong affective relationship between 1950s–1960s anticolonial nationalism and US civil rights, though one focused on national independence from external/imperial rule, and the other, on political equality within the preexisting state.Footnote 89 The World Peace Brigade’s anticolonial nationalist advocacy mission also grew out of past Western advocacy for Indian independence.Footnote 90 This transnational network stretched beyond the white Anglosphere: from the Indian independence movement through the 1960s, African American and Indian activists exchanged ideas and tactics in their struggles for democratic participation.Footnote 91 The World Peace Brigade was also a product of this “colored cosmopolitanism.”Footnote 92

In addition, the organization relied upon Third World elite politicians and the personal invitations of such national and nationalist leaders as Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda to launch its projects. Dependence on personal prestige and elite invitations did not negate the democratic, political justice–oriented aims of the Brigade. Nevertheless, it emphasized that connections between Martin Luther King (whose involvement was limited to his presence on Brigade letterhead), Jayaprakash Narayan, and Kenneth Kaunda were elite solidarities that did not necessarily reach the grassroots of anticolonial national liberation movements in East Africa.

Once in office, most leaders of postcolonial states shifted from global antiracism and anti-imperialism to state-promoting and state-protecting visions of their own country’s position in an international order made up of states. For instance, Indian political leaders were often imperfect guardians of the rights and liberties of minority peoples within their own borders. Independent India’s limited concern for civil rights within India (and its desire for US government development aid) decreased its interest in publicizing civil rights abuses in the United States.Footnote 93 As exemplified by the career of Kenneth Kaunda, when nationalist leaders became national leaders, transnational civil society ties became subsidiary to formal, state-to-state relations; such ties lost much of their impact because leaders of governments no longer needed them. Conversely, for nationalist claims within postcolonial nations, those transnational civil society connections were their diplomatic relations.

The World Peace Brigade proposed the possibility of nonviolent, anticommunist, majority-ruled postcolonial states. The organization supported peaceful regime change rather than radical nationalist liberation. It also prioritized the individual as the vessel of political change because this focus allowed the Brigade to remain outside of state-centric international relations, positioning it to be an honest broker between opposing sides, and reinforcing the importance of the individuals who made up the organization. Yet its prioritizing of individual solutions to structural international problems let the political “structure” – the order of nation-states that made up the international political system – off the hook. In a cynical reading, it also focused the spotlight on the personal moral stature of Brigade members rather than on the causes they espoused. As a result, the Brigade did not integrate itself into the fabric of the societies on whose behalf it sought to advocate and was at the mercy of the attention span and frailty of those individuals who composed the organization and of those, such as Kaunda and Nyerere, who had invited them in the first place.

The Brigade was one element in a brew of state and non-state actors – including mining companies and development organizations – that tried to mold anticolonial nationalism into the “correct” political (state-like) shape. While some of these actors had points of access to Northern Rhodesia/Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and other nationalists through colonial officials and particular domestic constituencies (such as trade unions),Footnote 94 individual Brigade members themselves were also links to those officials and constituencies. Before a nation gained its independence, transnational advocacy networks (such as the Brigade community) amplified nationalist claimants, positioning them as states-in-waiting. Although advocates could not provide the technical expertise or financial means required for economic planning or other core functions of newly independent states who wished to fulfill domestic expectations for rapid social and economic progress, they could – and did – connect anticolonial nationalists to those who were able to mobilize foreign capital for state-building purposes in the fluid and rapidly changing political terrain of global decolonization. The catch was that once nationalists gained genuine political power, they no longer needed Brigade intervention.

In 1963, the Brigade closed down its Africa Freedom Action Project in Dar es Salaam. Not only did Kenneth Kaunda no longer rely on the project for help in Zambia’s nationalist effort, but, in addition, the project’s notion of Dar es Salaam as the anti-Algiers was increasingly challenged. Over time, Dar es Salaam became one of the strongest locations not just for military training (already occurring in the early 1960s) but also of African socialist thought, from Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa writings to the African diaspora and Western socialists at the University of Dar es Salaam.Footnote 95 As early as 1963 – just a year after the project began – members of the Brigade were well aware that “Julius” was falling “into step with Ben Bella.”Footnote 96 Increasingly across the subsequent decade, Nyerere shifted to the left, became entangled with China, and the city took on a liberationist ideological slant.Footnote 97 The African Americans who came to Dar es Salaam in the 1970s were Black Panthers, not pacifist members of the mainstream US civil rights movement.Footnote 98

In this way, the Brigade’s effort to build an anti-Algiers project in Dar es Salaam dissolved. However, the Africa Freedom Action Project was the Africa – not the Northern Rhodesia – Freedom Action Project; members of the Brigade community were involved in a host of decolonizing questions in Sub-Saharan Africa. While they supported anticolonial nationalism in some places, such as the white-settler states of South Africa, South West Africa/Namibia, and Southern Rhodesia, in another instance – that of Katanga – they worked to undermine an incipient nationalist claim.

4 The Spectre of Katanga

During the early 1960s, the World Peace Brigade worked to transform nationalist movements into peaceful, anticommunist, democratic postcolonial states. In this process, the Brigade was just one of many advocacy organizations in a sphere of unofficial international politics, a sphere in which corporations also paired with nongovernmental organizations to provide assistance, funding, and de facto recognition to nationalist claims across the political spectrum. The political turmoil and international attention surrounding the United Nations intervention in Congo and the breakup of its neighboring Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1960–1965) made Sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter for this dynamic of unofficial, transnational advocacy.

Personal connections between nationalists and their advocates fueled this informal politics. In his 2013 memoir, the Africanist historian Terence Ranger described a 1958 New Year’s Eve dinner party at Rhodesian nationalist Paul Mushonga’s house in the suburb of Highfield in Salisbury, Rhodesia, capturing in freeze-frame this world of individual advocates and how their roles changed with decolonization. Mushonga’s guests included George and Eleanor Loft of the Friends Service Committee in Salisbury, as well as the Observer journalist Cyril Dunn, who would later attempt but leave incomplete a biography of Brigade leader Reverend Michael Scott. Since the Quakers were there en famille, Ranger wrote, “the room seemed to be overflowing with white babies. … It was a jovial scene – everyone except the Quakers drinking beer or spirits out of bottles.”Footnote 1 Within five years, Ranger had been deported to Dar es Salaam (1963), where he joined the liberationist intelligentsia in the city; Dunn was reporting on the lackadaisical judicial standards in Dallas following the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963);Footnote 2 Mushonga had died in an alleged car accident (1962).Footnote 3 George Loft had become vice president of the African-American Institute in New York City (1963), a nongovernmental organization that aimed to link the United States with “the students and leaders of emerging Black African states.”Footnote 4

The African-American Institute had been founded in 1953 by two American academics from Historically Black Universities: William Leo Hansberry of Howard University, and Horace Mann Bond of Lincoln University, which was the alma mater of both Kwame Nkrumah (first president of Ghana) and Mburumba Kerina (a Namibian nationalist). The following year, Allen Dulles, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, asked Harold K. Hochschild, head of the American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX), to chair the board of the Institute. At its helm for most of the subsequent decade, Hochschild shepherded chosen African anticolonial nationalist leaders on their trips to Washington, DC, and steered funds to their projects. AMAX had mining interests and shares in operations stretching from the province of Katanga in the southeastern end of Congo-Leopoldville, through the Rhodesias, to the northern portion of South West Africa. Hochschild had personal connections with US politicians and with African leaders. He was active in international Africa advocacy organizations and belonged to a group of informed and interested individuals who stood at the intersection of global economic and political investment on the decolonizing African continent.Footnote 5

Hochschild and the organizations in which he played leadership roles – AMAX and the African-American Institute – could serve as character references for, and implicit or even explicit supporters of, particular anticolonial nationalists, especially Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and the Namibian nationalists who made up the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), among others. Nationalists petitioned AMAX and the Institute for financial support at the same time, often on the same trip to New York, that they petitioned the United Nations for political recognition; Hochschild and Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the UN, compared notes.Footnote 6 Individuals such as Hochschild and organizations such as the African-American Institute and the World Peace Brigade operated in a sphere of politics whose inhabitants did not officially represent a government but who dealt with the business of government – that is, with issues of representation, sovereignty, and independence – for regions of the world that were struggling for independence, that is, for states-in-waiting.

It may seem counterintuitive for a mining company with operations in regions controlled by colonial or settler-colonial regimes to choose to support anticolonial nationalist aspirations. However, in 1962 AMAX chose to back certain anticolonial nationalists in Southern Africa.Footnote 7 It did so in direct response to the international blowback that its competitor, Union Minière, received for backing the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga. Katanga hovered over the imagination of advocates and nationalists as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism – the potential of failed national liberation – in which Western imperial interests had co-opted a state-in-waiting and violated postcolonial state sovereignty, in this case, that of Congo-Leopoldville, newly independent from Belgium.

Katanga’s Secession from Congo

On July 30, 1960, Belgium acceded to the demands for independence made by nationalists in its colony of Belgian Congo, and the State of Congo-Leopoldville was born.Footnote 8 Belgium came to this decision, in the words of Michel Struelens of Belgium’s Bureau of Tourism in Congo (and eventual representative in New York of the breakaway Congolese Republic of Katanga), because of “sheer funk – obsession with the Algerian war – and a rather Machiavellian calculation” that it could better maintain its Congolese investments in an independent Congo.Footnote 9 Thirteen days later, the mineral-rich Katanga province in southeastern Congo seceded from newly independent Congo, launching the events known as “the Congo Crisis.” In response, Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of Congo-Leopoldville, asked the United Nations to intervene militarily to prevent Katanga’s secession. Katanga’s secession was eventually suppressed during a five-year period of warfare and UN intervention.Footnote 10 During this period, the spectre of Katanga – that is, of anticolonial nationalism allegedly hijacked by a nationalist regime defined by its connections to the West and its anticommunist credentials – hung over nationalist aspirants and their advocates. Some, such as the Brigade community, opposed Katanga as neocolonialist. Others, who also backed white-settler rule in South Africa and Rhodesia, supported it and blamed the US and its European allies for failing to adequately sustain one of their anticommunist, postcolonial nationalist allies in the decolonizing world.Footnote 11

Katanga’s secession and its failure seemed to impose a Cold War dichotomy on the process of decolonization: a dichotomy between communist- and anticommunist-sympathizing organizations, movements, and governments. While this binary shaped how nationalists made and mobilized their claims, it often did not reflect the political aims, orientations, or experiences of many people and organizations operating outside and around spheres of government. For instance, a corporation such as AMAX, working in tandem with the African-American Institute, was connected to circles of international civil society activism as well as to national governments. Positioned to navigate between these shifting political categories, it negotiated with and funded education and training programs for new postcolonial elites as well as anticolonial nationalist exiles – who, they wagered, might be the new national elite once their territories became independent. The company had up-to-date information about the decolonizing world, including peoples and places far outside the knowledge of most in the West (including in governments), and access to power. It chose to work behind the scenes, through personal connections and affiliated organizations, supporting certain anticolonial nationalists.

In the early 1960s, the United Nations sought to be the global arbitrator for issues of national sovereignty and independence. The Congo Crisis, and the UN’s attempt to prevent Katanga’s secession, was to be its test run.Footnote 12 Both the leadership of the UN, which included Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and his brain trust of the “Congo Toilers” – Ralph Bunche, Andrew Cordier, Indar Jit Rikhye, Alexander MacFarquhar, and Francis Nwokedi, among othersFootnote 13 – and their critics were highly conscious of how the UN’s legacy would be shaped by the organization’s intervention.Footnote 14

Ralph Bunche arrived in Congo for its independence festivities and stayed through late August 1960. By the end, he was drained and sleep deprived, fearing that his presence portrayed the Congo intervention as a US Cold War endeavor rather than a UN intervention.Footnote 15 Bunche fell out with Lumumba, who asked the Soviets for material support when UN forces would not take up arms to prevent the secession of Katanga. For Bunche, assisting Congo was “like trying to give first aid to a wounded rattlesnake.”Footnote 16 Andrew Cordier was interim UN representative to Congo when Lumumba’s government split apart in September 1960 and Lumumba was murdered in January 1961. Cordier had allowed Lumumba to leave UN protection, and closed airports and the radio to calm violence – or to prevent Lumumba from mustering political support, or both, depending upon interpretation.Footnote 17 Lumumba’s death and Cordier’s perceived role catalyzed the February 1961 UN Security Council Resolution that changed its use of force doctrine from “no-initiative on the use of force” to “self-defense” of UN forces, galvanizing the institution to actively prevent Katanga’s secession.

Katanga – led by Moise Tshombe, a missionary-educated businessman from the Lunda people, an ethnic group in Katanga and Northern Rhodesia – had the financial backing of the Belgian multinational mining company Union Minière and the support of the Belgian government, while the UN supported a united Congo. Although the January 1961 assassination of Congolese president Lumumba in Katanga gave the United Nations the political will to use military force to halt the secession, it was still tough political and military terrain for the organization. The settler-colonial government of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland allied with Tshombe’s regime and provided a haven for Tshombe’s mercenaries (who returned to Katanga through an unregulated border after UN forces expelled them).Footnote 18 Faced with UN occupation, Tshombe called the UN forces “Communist troops” assisted by foreign powersFootnote 19 and launched an international publicity campaign in the Belgian, British, and US newspapers, designed to present Katanga as a “prosperous, peaceful, pro-western state in the process of being destroyed by a communist-oriented United Nations.”Footnote 20

Tshombe sent Michel Streulens (a graduate student at American University in Washington, DC, and formerly of the Belgian Congo Bureau of Tourism) as his designated ambassador to the United Nations in New York. UN leadership denied him an audience – which they could easily do, since he did not represent a UN member-state.Footnote 21 Streulens teamed up with the American Committee for Aid to Katangese Freedom Fighters (hereafter, Americans for Katangese Freedom) to stir up US support for Tshombe. Americans for Katangese Freedom – run by US congressman Walter Judd (R-MN) and African American political activist Max Yergan (former missionaries to China and South Africa, respectively), along with the public relations specialist Marvin Liebman – was one of many American advocacy organizations that supported anticommunist movements in China, Tibet, Katanga, the Rhodesias, and elsewhere, as well as apartheid rule in South Africa.Footnote 22 There was a slew of such organizations, with rotating names but the same anticommunist political platform and the same set of individuals involved. The Americans for Katangese Freedom explicitly linked the Congo Crisis to the Cold War – as shown in a typical comment from an organizational pamphlet: “Do not let the people of Katanga go the same way as the gallant people of Hungary, China, and Tibet who were betrayed into Communist slavery by the fault of free nations and their peoples.”Footnote 23 They worked with sympathetic US politicians, placing Katanga in the context of other nationalist insurgent movements.

The United Nations also considered Katanga part of a global network – of counterrevolutionary forces with wider ambitions on the decolonizing African continent. UN leadership believed that Tshombe’s Katangese mercenaries had “links with the OAS [Organisation de l’armée secrète, a pro-French Algeria terrorist organization] … if they help Tshombe to a victory at Elisabethville [Katanga’s capital], they might find extreme European interests in these areas which would support them and bring an industrial [i.e., supported by mining companies] potential in behind them.”Footnote 24 The UN special representative to Katanga, Conor Cruise O’Brien, was an outspoken champion of anticolonial nationalism, as well as a close friend and colleague of World Peace Brigade members. O’Brien arrived in Katanga and attempted to expel Tshombe’s European mercenaries as the embodiment of outside interference in Congolese affairs. This was a difficult task since the settler-colonial government of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, allied with Tshombe’s regime, provided a haven for expelled mercenaries who would then return through the unregulated border. Tshombe himself was involved “pretty heavily in Rhodesian party politics, and not in support to the African majority parties,” such as Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party in Northern Rhodesia.Footnote 25

Kaunda, a Northern Rhodesian nationalist, presented himself in international media as a Westernized, Christian, neo-Gandhian leader of a state-in-waiting. Similarly, Tshombe’s credentials as Western-educated and Christian were a repeated refrain for Americans for Katangese Freedom. They used Union Minière’s support of Tshombe to demonstrate that he was pro-business and anticommunist, simultaneously complaining that other Western corporations – namely, AMAX – were aligning with African anticolonial nationalists, “licking the boots of Kaunda.”Footnote 26 Americans for Katangese Freedom also made an illuminating slippage in its materials, using “arms” instead of “aid” to Katanga in a fundraising letter.Footnote 27

In some ways, Katanga served as Northern Rhodesia/Zambia’s distorted mirror. The two countries shared geography, geology, and some degree of ethnicity. Both Kaunda and Tshombe were missionary-educated and they were expert at the portrayal of respectable nationalist leadership for international audiences. They each chose and were chosen by a different mining company and a different advocacy network: Kaunda, AMAX, and the World Peace Brigade; Tshombe, Union Minière, and Americans for Katangese Freedom. Yet Kaunda was able to make his advocates depend on him, while Tshombe remained dependent on his advocates.

The United Nations justified its opposition to Tshombe’s regime because the institution feared the territorial unraveling of new postcolonial states.Footnote 28 Postcolonial state sovereignty was a delicate entity whose fragility threatened to undermine the UN’s legitimacy as the guarantor of that sovereignty. From the international institutional perspective, decolonization could go only so far, and no further, before it dissolved into chaos. Ralph Bunche, a much-respected UN mediator, worried that “sub”-national sovereign claims would destroy the tenuous stability of postcolonial nation-states.Footnote 29 In addition, the UN did not consider that Katanga’s government represented a legitimately nationalist African movement but, rather, saw it as a front for Western and settler-colonial interests. There was significant evidence for this perception, beyond the efforts of Americans for Katangese Freedom: the French military initially acquiesced to the recruitment of some of its officers to Tshombe’s mercenary forces;Footnote 30 Tshombe and Roy Welensky (prime minister of the Central African Federation) supported each other; Union Minière and other regional multinational mining companies, such as Tanganyika Concessions (in which AMAX also invested), shared shareholders.Footnote 31 O’Brien noted that Katanga’s Declaration of Independence (July 1960) had explicitly “ask[ed] Belgium to join with Katanga in a close economic community. It ask[ed] Belgium to continue its technical, financial and military aid. It ask[ed] Belgium to re-establish order and security.”Footnote 32

This “declaration of dependence” deserves further interrogation. In the 1960s, the United Nations saw a rapid expansion of its membership. It recognized many new postcolonial states and signified their sovereignty by granting them seats in the UN General Assembly. In the process, the UN came to have a vested interest in the importance of international-legal sovereignty as a defining feature of national sovereignty since it prioritized the importance of the UN institution as its source.Footnote 33

Tshombe’s Katanga proposed an alternative model – one of possible confederation – and this threatened the UN’s conception of postcolonial statehood. According to Bunche, Tshombe showed an “unhealthy interest” in the United States’ Articles of Confederation as a possible model for a prospective Congolese federation: Tshombe “seemed only to be encouraged when [informed] that the [Articles] had failed to work” – eluding to the Katangese leader’s lack of interest in supporting a unified, independent Congo.Footnote 34 The colonial boundaries of Congo, like most colonial boundaries, did not consider cross-border or regional affiliations. Katanga’s minister of finance told the New York Times that Katanga shared more commonalities with Northern Rhodesia than with the rest of Congo.Footnote 35 At issue were questions of national or ethnic authenticity, regional autonomy, and international backing that could either support or undermine perceived national legitimacy. Tshombe claimed a “tribal” affiliation for Katanga, to counter the idea of a Congolese nation.Footnote 36 This affiliation evoked the colonial “empowerment” of the tribe as a political unit in order to undermine the potential of national independence. At the same time, it attempted to demonstrate regional and ethnic precolonial authenticity in contrast to a national, Léopoldville-based government that had inherited colonial territorial boundaries.Footnote 37

To prevent Katanga’s secession, UN military forces occupied key positions in the region, at Elizabethville and Jadotville, taking and receiving casualties.Footnote 38 UN secretary general Hammarskjöld flew in to handle the peace talks with a disempowered Tshombe, but he died in a September 1961 plane crash before negotiating a ceasefire agreement.Footnote 39 Hammarskjöld’s death and the end of Katanga’s secession concluded the first phase of the UN intervention in Congo. Its official intervention in Congo ended in 1965, after the subsequent suppression of Congolese liberationist militias that led to a coup by (and consolidation of power under) Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko.Footnote 40 In the decades since, intermittent war and violence (and subsequent UN interventions) have continued. For anticolonial nationalists and their international advocates, the “spectre of Katanga” remained as a warning of what could happen if decolonization “went wrong.”

The Kennedy Team and Decolonization

The Congo Crisis and the secession of Katanga from Congo drew Western attention to Central and Southern Africa, a region previously considered peripheral to Great Power politics, even when it had been central to imperialism and global war. The US government did not have a State Department office on African issues until 1958; instead, it “worked directly with the colonials.”Footnote 41 Sensing a political opportunity in this vacuum of information and strategic thinking, then Senator John F. Kennedy, chair of the newly formed US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, sought out Americans with recent experience and expertise on matters pertaining to that continent. As part of this exploration, in 1958 JFK’s team hired Winifred Armstrong as an unofficial consultant for their staff.

Armstrong graduated from Swarthmore College in 1951 and traveled to the African continent five years later. After meeting with and receiving briefings and contacts from Western advocates in Paris, Brussels, and London, Armstrong purchased a round-trip plane ticket to Cape Town that allowed her to stop along the way up and down each coast. Over a period of two years, she traveled to an array of countries/colonies: Ghana, Togo(land), Dahomey (now Benin), Nigeria, (Belgian) Congo, South Africa, the Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt. She “visited and stayed with African and European families, at universities, schools, hospitals, and missions; and met political and educational leaders, [and those] concerned with community development, business and industry, religion, and labor.”Footnote 42 By the time Armstrong returned to the United States in 1958, she had established friendships and connections with particular nationalist leaders in much of Southern Africa. She also had more recent experience on the continent than almost anyone else in the United States. Kennedy recruited Armstrong to work unofficially for his Senate office – and then to his presidential campaign – for her African connections, knowledge, and experience. An initial six-week job turned into nearly two years of work.Footnote 43

While working for Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and transition team, Armstrong pushed the US to take a more nuanced and serious approach to national liberation in Africa. She argued that US foreign relations strategy needed to disaggregate binaries of “African versus European and colonial versus anticolonial interests” to find a “meaningful balance” in the formulation of policy. Most importantly, she believed that the US needed to “down-grade the importance of scoring Cold War points” in order to take “the initiative in formulating or at least actively supporting political, economic, and social proposals” for new nations on the decolonizing African continent.Footnote 44 In 1960, when seventeen African countries became independent, Armstrong sent telegrams of congratulations from Kennedy to many new nationalist leaders. Nobody else in Washington was reaching out in this manner; and for their recipients, these “telegrams of recognition” strongly signaled Kennedy’s interest in and support of African liberation.Footnote 45

Armstrong shared a degree of friendship with particular African anticolonial nationalists. She was part of a sphere of international support on behalf of anticolonial nationalists; a sphere that included the World Peace Brigade community as well as individuals associated with A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation and Reverend Michael Scott’s Africa Bureau.Footnote 46 Subsequently, she tried to assist these advocates when they traveled to the US to give testimony to the UN on behalf of African nationalists. She closed a position paper to president-elect Kennedy’s presumptive UN delegation with an extended plea to ease visa restrictions for Reverend Scott, “head of the Africa Bureau in London, [who] has been permitted over the past ten years [of petitioning the UN on behalf of South West Africa] free movement only in a 50-block area of Manhattan.”Footnote 47

The Africanist and Angola expert John Marcum also worked with the Kennedy team on decolonization questions. Together, Armstrong and Marcum advised Kennedy’s presidential campaign on African issues. Armstrong briefed Averell Harriman (a long-time Democratic politician as well as a foreign policy advisor) before his August 1960 fact-finding trip to Congo and West Africa, and set up his meetings with local politicians and dignitaries in those places, while Marcum traveled along as an escort. Armstrong also briefed Edward M. Kennedy, the president-elect’s brother, before his 1960 trip with a group of Democratic senators to Leopoldville and Elizabethville (Katanga’s capital), during Katanga’s secession.Footnote 48 Both Harriman’s and Edward Kennedy’s trips served as recognition of decolonization’s regime changes but were not meant to bind the United States to a particular policy direction. John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency; he was not yet the president. Indeed, the foreign policy of the Kennedy campaign and transition team could be compared to that of a state-in-waiting – or, more accurately, a regime-in-waiting. Harriman traveled as a private citizen, and Edward Kennedy, though sent as a proxy for his brother, was viewed as a political lightweight in Washington, DC, and was under instructions not to say anything that could be construed as outright support from the president-elect, just to listen.Footnote 49 However, for African anticolonial nationalists, these unofficial visits sent strong signals of future US support, and their optimism about this possibility was particularly strengthened after John F. Kennedy was elected president in November 1960.

Armstrong and Marcum always worked for Kennedy in unofficial capacities and on short-term contracts. When Kennedy became president, with an Africa office having been established at the US Department of State, their political orientation and methods were perceived as less necessary and potentially too complicating for US interests; their African connections, for which they were originally hired, were too potentially polarizing for a president. Marcum moved to Lincoln University and continued to work with the Kennedy administration to create a training program for African refugees – including leaders of nationalist movements, some of whom were graduates of Lincoln University.

Armstrong shifted to the National Planning Association, an American civil society research institute. She continued her field research in Sub-Saharan Africa and co-wrote a report on African private enterprise that included biographical sketches of African entrepreneurs, highlighting the importance she placed on individual agency in understanding structural political and economic questions.Footnote 50 Following her stint at the National Planning Association, AMAX hired Armstrong in 1965 for the same reasons that Kennedy had hired her in 1958: her knowledge of and connections to Africa’s new nationalist leaders before they had become heads of state, and her understanding of the political, social, and economic circumstances of both new postcolonial states and states-in-waiting. These skills were of great value for a corporation that sought to successfully navigate the forces of decolonization and, thereby, continue to reap profits from the territories involved.

The Declaration on the Granting of Independence

In December 1960, at the instigation of the Soviet Union and with the support of the United States, the UN General Assembly made a “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.”Footnote 51 This declaration on the granting of independence illuminated the idea of the UN as the organ of international recognition for new postcolonial states, as well as the limits inherent to that proposed role. By articulating an international norm concerning independence for “colonial countries and peoples,” the declaration was a foundational cornerstone for nationalist claimants and their international advocates worldwide, though it did not refer to peoples within postcolonial (or indeed metropolitan) states. In addition, because the UN set up a committee to monitor the declaration, “it became a year-round source of critique of imperial rule” as well as a portal for advocates and nationalists to access international politics.Footnote 52 And yet, by affirming the postcolonial unitary state as the end goal of the decolonization process, the declaration only supported nationalisms that did not revise the international boundaries of UN member-states – particularly of postcolonial ones, which were becoming the majority of the UN General Assembly.

Two years later, in 1962 – during the gathering clouds of Cold War conflict over Cuba and the continuing UN intervention in Congo – the UN committee to monitor the declaration, titled the “Special Committee of 17,” held its annual hearings in Dar es Salaam to assess the declaration’s impact, and the World Peace Brigade submitted a report to them. The Brigade argued that Western support for Katanga’s secession, motivated by a desire to continue to extract mineral wealth from that territory, “made Western democracy look like a giant runaway circus calliope”: while “pleasant music came from the top” of the carnival steam organ, its wheels crushed “the people down below.”Footnote 53

Kenneth Kaunda also personally testified in front of the UN Special Committee of 17 in Dar es Salaam in 1962. There, the Soviet member, happy to draw international attention to Western malfeasance in Southern Africa, asked him which “foreign companies control the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia and what links there might be between these companies and the companies which were engaged in similar activities in neighboring Katanga.”Footnote 54 Kaunda did not answer the question directly. Instead, he cited an article that Michael Scott of the World Peace Brigade used later that year (in his own testimony to the same committee) to describe the interlocking directorships of mining companies in the Southern African Copperbelt, drawing upon the scholarship of anthropologist Alvin Wolfe.Footnote 55

A few months after Kaunda testified, Michael Scott did so as well to the same UN Special Committee of 17, in September 1962. He attacked mining companies in Southern Africa as obstacles to Western support for national self-determination because of their continuing efforts to exploit mineral resources in that region. He alleged that (1) Britain refused to intervene on the issue of white-settler colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia because of the “powerful vested interest” of mining companies; (2) the structure of mining interests relied on cheap African labor and white domination; and (3) the British South Africa Company, Anglo American, Union Minière, the Rhodesian Selection Trust, Tanganyika Concessions, and AMAX – all involved with various African postcolonial states and states-in-waiting – shared interlocking and overlapping boards of directors and shareholders.Footnote 56

Scott attacked the “autonomous industrial system in Southern Africa that is beyond the control of African nations,” relying, as Kaunda did, on Wolfe’s research. AMAX took careful, anxious notice, tracking Scott’s allegations through UN, US government, and newspaper sources as it put together a private report to counter Scott’s testimony.Footnote 57 While Kaunda – wanting to avoid the perception of too close an alignment with the Soviets – had reassured AMAX as well as the Rhodesian Selection Trust mining company privately about his future amenability, AMAX was horrified by the charges made by Scott.Footnote 58 It worried about looking like the Union Minière of Southern Africa: “[O]nly I.G. Farben during and after the [Second World] war would compete with Union Minière’s new public image” as a Western corporation continuing imperial policy in blackface.Footnote 59 AMAX could not dispute the composition of its board, so it began a multiyear campaign to demonstrate support for anticolonial nationalist African elites who were becoming the leaders of new postcolonial states with mines – while it continued to mine in South African-ruled South West Africa. AMAX wanted to escape being branded “the I. G. Farben of decolonization,” but without altering its mining operations.

Scott’s financial backers – that is, the board of his advocacy organization, the Africa Bureau – did not find his “interlocking directorship” comments amusing, just as they had initially been upset by Kaunda’s testimony. Sir Ronald Prain of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a long-time donor and member of the Africa Bureau’s board of directors (as well as a friend and colleague of the Hochschilds of AMAX), was furious and demanded an apology from Scott.Footnote 60 Scott wriggled out, claiming that he respected Sir Ronald’s “sincere conviction” but that his (Scott’s) UN testimony had provided the Rhodesian Selection Trust with the “opportunity of stating its case” and countering the “myths and smears” that had been “promulgated in the UN” because Western mining companies’ continued interests in “Katanga seemed to support the allegations.”Footnote 61 Kaunda, as noted, had sought to placate those who would be among independent Zambia’s largest foreign investors, apologizing to top officials from AMAX and the Rhodesian Selection Trust for submitting Wolfe’s piece. When Kaunda justified his use of the piece because there was no other reputable reporting on the mining question, AMAX promised to provide him with a written brief outlining the “international financial relationships of the Copperbelt mining companies.”Footnote 62

Eventually, Scott was able to facilitate a rapprochement with Prain, and also between Prain, the Rhodesian Selection Trust, and Kaunda. Scott, Kaunda, and Prain had private meetings on the future of Northern Rhodesian/Zambian development; when Kaunda visited London in 1963, he had at least four meetings with Prain, who offered to act as “an intermediary” between Kaunda and “the Rockefeller Foundation’s offer” to give development assistance to soon-to-be independent Zambia.Footnote 63 The Kaunda-Scott-Prain-Rockefeller Foundation linkage shows the significant influence and benefits of advocacy in action. Scott and Prain played crucial roles connecting Kaunda to US developmental assistance when Zambia was still a state-in-waiting; Scott vouched for Kaunda to Prain, Prain vouched for Kaunda to the Rockefeller Foundation, and doors that might otherwise have been closed to an anticolonial nationalist leader were opened. Strategically, Kaunda and Scott publicly distanced themselves from Western mining companies while working closely with them in private.

Scott’s “interlocking directorates” comment became a repeated phrase for Southern African nationalists and their advocates at the UN. The big mining multinationals in the Copperbelt in the early 1960s were Union Minière, AMAX, Prain’s Rhodesian Selection Trust (eventually a subsidiary of AMAX), and Anglo-American. They had a number of subsidiaries that they did not operate but in which they held shares; shareholders from each mining multinational sat on the others’ boards, lending credence to Scott’s allegations.

In Northern Rhodesia, Prain’s Rhodesian Selection Trust (of which AMAX held controlling shares) had implemented a developmentalist approach toward its Black African workforce since the Second World War. Rhodesian Selection Trust had loaned millions of pounds to the Northern Rhodesian and Nyasaland colonial governments with the stipulation that the funds be spent in regions where they recruited their Black African labor.Footnote 64 The company also broke the color bar, working to desegregate high-skilled jobs previously monopolized by white workers, an effort that those workers strongly opposed.Footnote 65 Prain’s early adoption of antiracist policies deserves recognition, but it was also linked to the profit motive. He believed that opening high-skilled positions to Black Africans would lower wages for all workers.Footnote 66

The Hochschilds of AMAX supported Prain’s education and training programs, which they thought would improve the quality and efficiency of their Black African labor force and simultaneously undercut the potential of nationalist agitation.Footnote 67 By the early 1960s, both Prain and the Hochschilds had a decade-long commitment to liberal, antiracist development in their Copperbelt mines, a commitment that also served their own economic interests. Black African technicians could be paid less than white ones, and peaceful regime change from colony to independent state allowed for continuity of mining operations. For these reasons, in their view, Kaunda’s platform of nonviolence and multiracialism made him an attractive leader of a postcolonial state. His embrace of a decolonization process that worked with, rather than against, Western economic interests was even more valuable to his international backers when contrasted to the violence and expense of the UN’s military intervention in Katanga. The decimation of Union Minière’s reputation due to that company’s backing of Katanga’s secession from Congo led AMAX to take strong measures to distinguish itself from the other Copperbelt corporations.

While AMAX attempted to differentiate itself from various other Southern African mining operations in order to minimize international perception of its involvement in contentious global hot spots, the World Peace Brigade worked to knit together its advocacy against Katanga’s secession, South African rule of South West Africa, apartheid in South Africa, and colonialism across southern Africa. The Brigade’s protest at the South African consulate in New York City in October 1962, headlined by Bayard Rustin, Scott, and other members of the Brigade community, explicitly combined these issues.Footnote 68 This “bundling” was tactical: to gather as many supporters as possible to its cause by expanding its scope.

In his 1962 testimony to the UN Special Committee of 17, Michael Scott warned about greater looming issues instigated by the spectre of Katanga, which illustrated “what waste, destruction and suffering could be caused by political breakdowns and the failure to find adequate constitutional means of solving problems of conflicting interests and national ambitions. … Resistance to injustice, tyranny and deprivation of rights was part of the struggle for peace,” since violence in Central and Southern Africa would lead to “the power struggle between the so-called East and West.”Footnote 69 Scott used the threat of violence and Cold War conflict to try to get the UN to act. His motto: Violence will take over where law founded on justice ends. He blamed extra-legal violence against Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (in Zambia) on “criminals from Katanga” allied with the settler-colonial government of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.Footnote 70 In Scott’s formulation, Kaunda’s nonviolent resistance to oppression would lead to a racially representative government, peacefully achieved; whereas, the counterrevolutionary nationalism of Moise Tshombe in Katanga and of the white-settler colony of Rhodesia would undermine Kaunda’s political ascendency and the challenge that ascendency would pose to their power in the region.

Federation Thinking and the Cold War Trap

Regional dynamics engulfed the Congo Crisis.Footnote 71 Katanga bordered the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963), whose breakup seemed imminent in the early 1960s. The Central African Federation was a British effort to find a halfway solution between empire and national independence in Southern Africa.Footnote 72 This attempted compromise faltered between the competing demands of African nationalists and of settler-colonials for self-rule. Kenneth Kaunda of Northern Rhodesia was a leader in the nationalist effort, supported by the World Peace Brigade, for an independent Zambia; simultaneously, Moise Tshombe of Katanga, and Roy Welensky of Southern Rhodesia were in talks to forge a Copperbelt state on the bones of the Federation.Footnote 73 While sharing geographic contiguity, a degree of overlapping ethnic groups, and copper mines, Northern Rhodesia/Zambia was considered the site of a legitimate nationalist movement while Katanga was a neocolonial front for a Western mining company.

The UN’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence, which sought to establish an international norm of national self-determination, coincided in time with proposals for regional federations throughout the decolonizing world – and might seem to be in opposition to such proposals.Footnote 74 At first glance, some of these proposals for federation (including that which became the Organization of African Unity) appeared as if they might challenge the unitary sovereignty of states. However, in political practice the federations that came into existence were institutional frameworks that focused on protecting the sovereignty of their members rather than expanding their own federated power structures.Footnote 75 Rather than offering an alternative to the postcolonial state, the federations that came into existence ended up as vehicles for those states to project greater international influence. Perhaps, instead of providing an expansive political vision beyond the shape (and limits) of the state, proposed federations – even the short-lived postcolonial ones such as the United Arab Republic (1958–1961) or the West Indian Federation (1958–1962) – were demonstrations of affinity between separate polities rather than structures of overarching unity surrounding them.

The Central African Federation, a colonial rather than postcolonial political structure, rarely features in these conversations about federations. It proposed a political possibility – of allegedly multiracial, shared government as a halfway measure between empire and independence – and then reversed its initial mission by dissolving into territorially bound, racially determined states. Discussing the probable demise of the Central African Federation, the Soviet representative on the UN Special Committee of 17 brought up the alleged secret talks between Tshombe of Katanga and Roy Welensky (prime minister of the Central African Federation) on “the union of Katanga with Northern Rhodesia.” According to the Soviets, António de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister and de facto dictator of Portugal, was also in talks with Welensky about “the establishment of a confederation between the CAF and the Portuguese colonies in Africa. It was their hope that that confederation, [with the] close cooperation of the Republic of South Africa … would make it possible to maintain white domination” in Central and Southern Africa.”Footnote 76 This white confederacy would be “backed by enormous economic and political forces,” since Northern Rhodesia’s copper production was in the hands of Anglo-American Corporation and of AMAX, who, according to the Soviets, wanted easier access to Katanga’s copper.Footnote 77

In November 1962, Jacob Kuhangua, a Namibian nationalist and member of the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), had just returned from Congo-Léopoldville, where he had met with Angolan nationalists. In testimony before the UN’s Special Committee of 17, Kuhangua said that SWAPO and the National Liberation Front of Angola “intended to announce to the international community their intention of forming in the future a Federation of the Independent States of Angola, Bechuanaland [which became independent Botswana in 1966] and South West Africa.”Footnote 78 Their “intention to announce” a proposed federation to an international audience was more important than any actual plans for a federation. Similarly, whether or not Welensky and Tshombe had any realistic plans to federate a Copperbelt state was less important than their announced plans to do so – because such plans indicated their rejection of the colonial geopolitical and territorial definitions of Congo-Léopoldville and Northern Rhodesia (independent Zambia in 1964). In the same way, from the other end of the political spectrum, Kuhangua’s intent to form a Namibian-Angolan federation indicated a similar rejection of colonial borders and state structures.Footnote 79 These announced plans for federations remained deliberately vague. They were tools for demonstrating alliance and affinity rather than sustained attempts to redraw political units.

The Congo Crisis showed leaders of new postcolonial states the threat to their own fragile sovereignty posed by competing nationalist movements with powerful international backers (such as Katanga). As demonstrated throughout the crisis, decolonization struggles could easily take on a Cold War character in a manner that had little to do with the Cold War or the global-political stance of particular nationalist organizations. In addition, nationalist claimants were not simply acted upon by the Great Powers; they also played “the Cold War game.” In that “game,” for instance, Michel Streulens (Tshombe’s Belgian press agent in New York City), playing off residual McCarthyism,Footnote 80 lobbied US legislators to label both the UN and Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of Congo, as communist fronts. As noted, Kaunda made nice with all. While conciliating the Soviets by calling out the activities of Western corporations, he also made private agreements with the same corporations. In the words of a contemporary commentator, African nationalists “were attempting to do something more or less in this time frame the Indian government was failing at – and that is[,] not to be either partisan or an agent of one or the other of the major power blocs. And if the Indians could not do it, it’s no surprise that [they] did not do it either.”Footnote 81 Avoiding the “Cold War trap” confounded not just Indians or Africans; it confounded the UN institution as well.

Advocates of nationalist claimants were also not immune from Cold War thinking. Michael Scott’s strategic formulation during the 1962 UN hearings before the Special Committee of 17 relied on the threat of Cold War intervention: If the UN did not handle the problems of political injustice in the decolonizing world, then nationalist movements would become violent; if they became violent, then they would invite First World–Second World proxy wars in the Third World. This relationship between the Cold War, decolonization, and the role of the United Nations underscored how the Cold War endangered the United Nations’ ability to function as it was intended to and, thereby, to justify its own role in handing questions of international war and peace.

After the Second World War, UN intervention in Congo as well as wider patterns of decolonization took place within the possibilities of action prescribed by the Cold War framework – whether the parties involved liked it or not, tried to break away from it or not, or were aware of it or not. While the Cold War political straitjacket provided the opportunity for the UN to take the leadership role in Congo, UN officials understood how it also limited what the UN could do. As early as July 23, 1960 – twelve days after Katanga declared independence from just-liberated Congo-Léopoldville – UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld cabled, “If the Cold War settles on the Congo, our whole effort is lost.”Footnote 82

How, then, do we conceptualize decolonization outside a Cold War frame? A better way to “frame” the question might be: How were the people actively involved in the process of decolonization thinking about it at the time? Nationalists and their advocates had their own interests and goals even as they were enmeshed in Cold War politics. While the US foreign policy establishment and its intelligence operatives knew very little about politics in Congo before 1960, they knew a lot about the international webs of missionaries and business interests in the region.Footnote 83 The UN special envoy to Katanga Conor Cruise O’Brien, amusingly detailed how the US would lobby Ireland within the General Assembly on “colonial” issues by “produc[ing] a sensible, relevant missionary (Roman Catholic) if available and if vote of sufficient importance.”Footnote 84 O’Brien’s remark hints at the interplay of multiple international networks – of missionaries, activists, and scholars; but also of business interests, of diaspora populations (sometimes created by decolonization), and eventually of development assistance experts. These were networks that the nationalists themselves mobilized to access power; networks that shaped and often constrained nationalist movements because they – the networks themselves – served multiple interests.

Conclusion

Networks of nationalist claimants and their advocates operated behind the scenes through personal connections even as they performed in public on the floor of the United Nations. As noted, Michael Scott introduced Kenneth Kaunda to Ronald Prain of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, who in turn brought Kaunda to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, a process that reinforced Kaunda’s transition from nationalist to national leader. In this way, Kaunda used advocates to develop and enhance his status with global powers and business interests before he became independent Zambia’s first president. In another example, Winifred Armstrong lobbied on behalf of Mburumba Kerina of South West Africa when she worked for then US senator John F. Kennedy. She helped regularize Kerina’s visa status in the US so that he could attend the Second Afro-Asian People’s Conference in Tunis in January 1960, aiding the development of his international profile as a Namibian nationalist claimant.Footnote 85 Networks of nationalists and their advocates were multiple, multidirectional, and overlapping: when Kerina asked Armstrong to urge Kennedy “to meet privately with the Union Government [of South Africa]” about the possibility of making South West Africa a UN Trust Territory, he reminded her to send written corroboration of his international petitioning to other Namibian nationalist claimants.Footnote 86 Kerina’s petitioning worked in two different directions: from Armstrong to Kennedy to Christian Herter (US secretary of state, 1959–1961),Footnote 87 and through Armstrong to leaders of rival Namibian nationalist formations.

As connectors between spheres of Great Power politics, multinational corporations, and international institutions, advocates formed bridges of continuity between empire and independence during the moments when decolonization promised to reorder international relations. Both Tshombe’s and Kaunda’s international advocates worked to legitimize these nationalists (and thus their claims) in international politics by stressing their “civilizational” similarities with Western norms of respectable leadership.Footnote 88 Nationalist leaders made use of the prestige and connections of advocates who worked behind the scenes, maneuvering within the international-legal interstices of the United Nations institution. These interested individuals and organizations disaggregated Cold War binaries at the same time that they served Cold War projects, forming the strands of informal communication during moments of possible rupture. When formal modes of continuity – of capital, development, and state-to-state diplomacy – reasserted themselves in new, postcolonial states, these advocates, these unofficial politicians, dropped away. They were useful gatekeepers for advancing nationalist leaders in the realm of international politics and support, but their activities were incompatible with the sovereignty of the national leaders who came to lead independent states.

Nationalist movements generally condensed their state-making aspirations to align with colonial boundaries. With important exceptions, such as Bangladesh, secessionist insurgent movements that would have revised colonial borders tended to fail. Kwame Nkrumah (president of Ghana and a founding member of the Organization of African Unity) and Julius Nyerere (prime minister of Tanganyika and president of Tanzania, its successor state) looked to a United States of Africa rather than to a United States of Ghana or Tanzania.Footnote 89 They – as well as Moise Tshombe of Katanga and Roy Welensky of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, with their imagined federated Copperbelt state; or Jacob Kuhangua of SWAPO with his proposed Namibia-Botswana-Angola amalgamation – called for forms of African federation, not federated power structures within their respective states and states-in-waiting.

Katanga’s secession raised a three-headed spectre: of illegitimate nationalism, of decolonization’s potential failure, and of the challenge of “sub”-nationalisms to the emergent postcolonial international order of the expanding membership of the UN General Assembly. At a practical level, from the perspective of the UN, Katanga’s secession sabotaged the hope of a functional, democratic, independent Congo – and of the UN’s playing a key role in midwifing that creation.Footnote 90 In addition, Katanga’s secession called newly nationalized state boundaries into question, therefor raising the prospect of international intervention – by the UN, multinational corporations, and Cold War actors – to police those boundaries. These interventions operated beyond Congo’s geographic limits and had an immediate impact on the wider financial concerns and political spheres in which Katanga was embedded: on the arcs of international investment, resource extraction, and controlled labor mobility surrounding mining in contiguous regions of Southern and Central Africa.Footnote 91

For the United Nations – attempting to position itself as the arbitrator of legitimate national self-determination – Katanga represented the tarnishing of decolonization’s promise at the moment of the process’s seeming greatest possibility. For that reason, anticolonial nationalist claimants and their advocates would not have wanted their efforts labeled under any title that included the name “Katanga.”Footnote 92 The spectre of Katanga created a sense of revulsion and fear for proponents of anticolonial nationalist liberation because it rendered alternative postcolonial political possibilities both less feasible and less desirable – potentially the thin end of the wedge of neocolonialism.

5 Capital and Claims-Making

The historical trajectory of states-in-waiting – nationalist insurgent movements that claimed but had not yet received independence – was determined by many overlapping factors: their international-legal status vis-à-vis the United Nations, their popular support within their territories, the presence or absence of regional allies, their role in global Cold War politics, and the influence and impact of their international advocates, who often served as the connectors between these geopolitical spheres. In addition, a territory’s possession (or lack) of economic resources desired by multinational corporations shaped the pathways of particular nationalist claimants. In Southern Africa, the presence of natural resources made advocacy networks thick, overladen, multiple, and intertwined.

Especially in the context of the Cold War, nationalist claimants could find support from a range of governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and the advocates who operated between these realms. Competition at the United Nations among nationalists and advocates for each other’s attention worked in both directions, creating what the advocate and World Peace Brigade member Reverend Michael Scott termed “bargaining football,” where anticolonial nationalist movements vied for the notice, logistical support, and the legitimacy that international forums could provide.Footnote 1 Alongside this politicking at the United Nations, multinational mining companies sought to gain and maintain access to resources when colonies became new postcolonial states led by former nationalist movements. This dynamic created multiple interests and increased the competition between claimants and advocates.

Mining Nationalism in Southern Africa

South West Africa, present day Namibia, was a German colony from 1884 until 1915.Footnote 2 Following imperial Germany’s defeat during the First World War, the territory became a League of Nations mandate administered by South Africa. When the League became the United Nations, League of Nations mandates were transformed into UN trust territories and placed along the path of eventual, theoretical independence. However, South Africa sought to absorb South West Africa within its own sovereign borders, rather than allow it to become a trust territory. In response, Namibian claimants and their advocates petitioned the UN from 1946 onward to prevent this territorial incorporation (particular ethnic groups in Namibia had also petitioned the League of Nations, protesting the violent abuses of German imperial rule). Attempting to navigate these competing forces, as a practical matter the United Nations categorized South West Africa as a “former League of Nations mandate” rather than as a South African province, trust territory, or independent state. Because it was a former mandate, Namibia had its own UN committee – the Committee on South West Africa – which became a crucial portal for its nationalist claims-making. As decolonization shifted global norms in favor of national self-determination, the UN General Assembly officially dissolved the mandate in 1966, recognizing the potentiality of Namibia’s independence.Footnote 3 However, Namibia remained de facto South African territory until the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of apartheid, eventually becoming independent only in 1990.

The international-legal dimensions of Namibia’s struggle for national liberation are well known and well told.Footnote 4 In addition, the territory was integrated within international politics through mining interests. A mine can mean more than a mine: the promise of resources and development can represent more than what lies beneath the land; claims to territory and its resources are central to the demand for sovereignty.Footnote 5 Because of its German colonial past in which its colonizers did not recognize indigenous territorial rights, Namibia’s subterranean resources were (and are) not the property of individual landowners but, rather, of the ruling South West African Authority (and today, the Government of Namibia).Footnote 6 Therefore, mining companies owned licenses to extract minerals rather than owning the mineral deposits themselves.Footnote 7 Who controlled the South West African/Namibian government, then, was directly related to who could receive a license to access the country’s valuable mineral resources.

From 1907 onward, and intensifying after the Second World War, Tsumeb Mine in Northern Namibia was a productive copper mine and a center of regional migration and economic life. In the words of a migrant laborer family who moved to Tsumeb in the 1950s, “[I]t was a town like … how do you call it, in a word? Manna? Milk and Honey!”Footnote 8 By local standards, Tsumeb was “big” and “bustling,” though it took less than a half hour to cross the width of the town by foot.Footnote 9 It was a company town where “life centered on the mine, a huge complex of buildings and monstrous machines where work never stopped.”Footnote 10 According to the Namibian nationalist John Ya-Otto, Tsumeb mine

attracted people from all over the country … [members of the ethnic groups of] Hereros, Namas, Damaras, and Ovambos all lived side by side. Nearly all the men worked for the American Tsumeb Corporation as clerks, drivers, machine operators or staff in the company’s hotels and white workers’ bunkhouses. Most of the actual miners were contract workers who were confined to the compound, a cluster of big dormitories surrounded by a tall cement wall … [T]he police were always ready to pick up anyone who strayed into town. Only on Sundays were the workers free to leave the compound …Footnote 11

Ya-Otto’s reflection suggests the importance of Tsumeb mine as a regional nexus for the intermingling – which remained tightly controlled by apartheid segregation – of ethnic and racial groups, with a US-based multinational corporate employer. The issues of labor organizing, ethnic political alignment, and (the potential of) international oversight/interest converged at the mine.

Figure 5.1 Tsumeb Mine, 2015.

Photo: Lydia Walker

Newmont Mining Company, which operated Tsumeb mine, owned 30 percent of the mine; American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX), 30 percent; Rhodesian/Roan Selection Trust, 14 percent; and multiple investors divided the final 26 percent.Footnote 12 Much of the anticolonial nationalist agitation and advocacy concerning Tsumeb focused on AMAX, as the larger and more famous company, rather than on Newmont, its operating company. Additionally, AMAX – both because of the ties that its founding chairman, Harold K. Hochschild, had to the African-American Institute (a civil society advocacy organization that facilitated connections between the United States and African anticolonial nationalists, as well as newly independent African governments) and because of the company’s past desegregation of its labor force in Zambia – was considered a more sympathetic interlocutor and therefore a more productive target of nationalist agitation.Footnote 13

The presence of a US multinational corporation that was perceived as sympathetic to anticolonial nationalism, combined with a labor force dominated by the Ovambo ethnic group, which composed the leadership of the nationalist South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) – made Tsumeb mine a prime site for nationalist claims-making and contestation. It situated South West Africa within the political and economic context of Southern African copper mining, and interconnected nationalist and anti-apartheid movements in Zambia, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and South Africa.Footnote 14 Simultaneously, South West Africa’s status as a former League of Nations mandate set Namibian nationalists apart from other nationalist movements in that the Namibians had a direct portal for their international claims-making in the form of their own UN committee. The presence of this international stage shaped the Namibian independence struggle, while the regional context of resource extraction increased the number of international actors involved behind the scenes at the UN Committee on South West Africa.

Mining companies do not have a reputation for supporting anticolonial nationalist movements. Indeed, corporate support for liberation movements could potentially undermine the perceived legitimacy of the independence struggle itself. In the case of Namibia, this did not occur because the negotiations between nationalists, advocates, and corporate directors occurred behind closed doors. These negotiations and conversations with capitalists sat uncomfortably with nationalist movements’ public claims-making and historical narrative-making. Because their meetings and correspondence were unofficial, “off the record,” often secret, the connections they fostered are difficult to find in available records. Yet even in their limited documentation, these private exchanges make visible the presence of capital and capitalists in the process of decolonization, a presence that did not ignore state power but also did not rely upon it.

Certain conversations – such as those between SWAPO and mining companies – could not be made public for two reasons: First, because leaders of nationalist movements had no standing to be official negotiating partners with international institutions, governments, or corporations. Second, because if word of those negotiations reached their territories, it would tarnish the anticolonial, nationalist legitimacy of the leader in question by revealing his association with Western capitalist interests. As with many other states-in-waiting, Namibian nationalists benefited from private advocacy and were careful to distinguish between those entities they would associate with in public and those they would not.

Branding the Nation-State-to-Be

The nationalist movement that became SWAPO – which was recognized by the UN General Assembly in 1973 as the “authentic voice of the Namibian people” and has been the ruling party of independent Namibia since 1990 – was founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1957 as the Ovamboland People’s Congress.Footnote 15 The date and circumstances behind SWAPO’s founding are subject to debate in Namibian history, demonstrating the legacies of the contestations within the nationalist movement.Footnote 16

In the late 1950s, a group of predominantly Ovambo workers and students, including Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, Jariretundu Kozonguizi (who was Herero), and Jacob Kuhangua met for private international-law discussions in the basement of Jack Simons, a professor at the University of Cape Town.Footnote 17 Simons’s seminars dealt with South West Africa’s international-legal mandate status and how to use it to craft a national independence strategy. Ya Toivo sent an audiotaped petition – hidden in a hollowed-out copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – to the UN Committee on South West Africa, through Mburumba Kerina. Kerina, who was of mixed ethnicity, was the first Namibian to join Michael Scott in 1956 at the United Nations in New York City, when Scott petitioned the UN – as the personal, accredited representative of Herero chief Hosea Kutako – on behalf of Namibian nationalists, as he did annually from 1946 onward.

After Ya Toivo “got naughty” and sent the tape, the South African government deported him to South West Africa in December 1958, where he lived under surveillance for a decade.Footnote 18 He ran the general store (and allegedly SWAPO’s regional intelligence operations) in Ondangwa (250 kilometers northwest of Tsumeb), where SWAPO members would link up before traveling to Tsumeb, a destination for Ovambo contract laborers who worked in the mine and were a source of SWAPO’s recruits.Footnote 19 In 1968, the South African apartheid regime tried Ya Toivo for treason and imprisoned him for sixteen years on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, a leader of the South African anti-apartheid movement and, eventually, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa.

While Ya Toivo remained in South West Africa, his Cape Town colleague, Kozonguizi – eventually the leader of SWAPO’s rival, SWANU (the South West African National Union) – made his way to New York City and joined Kerina and Scott at the United Nations.Footnote 20 During the period from 1959 to 1960, Kerina, Sam Nujoma (who emerged as the leader of SWAPO and ultimately became Namibia’s first president), and Kuhangua combined the ethnically defined Ovamboland People’s Congress (founded in Cape Town) with the Ovamboland People’s Organization (based in Windhoek) into the nationally defined South West African National Congress; in the early 1960s it was renamed the South West African People’s Organization.Footnote 21

In New York City in 1959, Kerina wrote to Ya Toivo stressing the importance of changing the nationalist movement’s name in order to give the organization a “national character which can be of great use to” its political positioning at the UN.Footnote 22 The purpose of such a name change was to underline the national rather than the ethnic character of the organization. If other ethnic groups did “not want to cooperate … just go ahead and change” the movement’s name, Kerina wrote. And if other groups chose to join – Kerina discussed the possibility of SWAPO’s having a Herero vice president underneath Ya Toivo and Nujoma (who were Ovambo) – he emphasized that it was important not to alter the movement’s current leadership to reflect the national character of the newly named organization.Footnote 23 Nationalist claims-making rather than ethnic affiliation was a project that Kerina knew SWAPO needed to perform, even if it was not yet an identity that existed on the ground. Kerina, Ya Toivo, and Nujoma were thinking long-term with their national aspirations. This nationalist rebranding, and the internal contention it obscured, showed the importance of advocating for a territorially rather than an ethnically defined nation (however colonial might be its boundaries) in order to gain international legitimacy and the potential of future recognition.

Enshrining these vestigial, colonial turned international-legal borders into national (“Namibian”) and international (that of the United Nations) consciousness was a project, not predetermined, in 1959. Between 1957 and 1958, the UN Good Offices Committee on South West Africa considered splitting the territory, turning Ovamboland and surrounding northern areas (including Tsumeb) into a new kind of Trust territory, administered by South Africa (as it had been under the League of Nations).Footnote 24 This proposal would then have allowed the southern portion of Namibia to be annexed fully as a province of South Africa. In October 1958, the UN General Assembly rejected this proposal for “partition and annexation.”Footnote 25 In his 1959 letter to Ya Toivo, Kerina argued for the importance of a national (rather than ethnic) framing for their claims-making – not necessarily because he wanted the movement to maintain Ovambo dominance, but because he believed that it was integral that the “national” geographic territory of the Mandate become the borders of what they hoped would become their eventual independent state.Footnote 26

Years later, in the late 1960s, after SWAPO had emerged as the dominant organization in the Namibian nationalist movement and the name “Namibia” had replaced “South West Africa” at the United Nations, national-territorial names remained a site of political dispute. In 1968, SWANU, SWAPO’s by-then disempowered rival, petitioned the UN to “protest against the name Namibia.”Footnote 27 Most of SWANU’s membership came from a different ethnic group than that of SWAPO; tensions between the groups grew as SWAPO received more international support. SWANU’s protest addressed issues of self-determination: “[W]e expect that our people should have been asked first before the christening ceremony was staged.” The UN General Assembly gave “us a new name” and claimed it “to be our wish. … What next will be decided or done in our name?”Footnote 28 The UN’s official name change of “South West Africa” to “Namibia” occurred with the support of some, but not all, Namibian nationalists. SWANU’s objection to the name “Namibia” was a symptom of its antagonism toward SWAPO’s ascendance at the UN. SWANU’s rejection of the name also reflected a rebuff to the UN as the institutional “bequeather” of international recognition because the institution had legitimized Namibia under the framework of SWANU’s rival. Even a name meant to symbolize a rebuff to colonialism by discarding a colonial label (“South West Africa”) could share the imperial connotation of outsiders naming – and thereby determining – a people through bestowing international recognition.

At the United Nations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, SWAPO (under the mostly Ovambo leadership of Nujoma, Kuhangua, and Kerina) and SWANU (under the mostly Herero leadership of Kozonguizi) tried to present themselves as unified and nationalist rather than in competition and ethnically defined.Footnote 29 At the time, both organizations had limited name recognition within their country itself. According to one of their international advocates in 1961, Randolph Vigne (a South African Liberal Party politician and member of the anti-apartheid movement who went on a fact-finding mission to South West Africa in 1961), “[N]either SWAPO nor SWANU were known” in the country, “… [y]et the same [ordinary] people insisted that every man knew through the UN they might get their country back.”Footnote 30 He argued that SWAPO lacked leadership in South West Africa and did nothing in-country: “all [wa]s centered in the work of the petitioners at the UN.”Footnote 31

Vigne’s words can be read as disparaging the “naiveté” of a people who see their potential political deliverance in the hands of a distant international institution. At the same time, the sentiment captured ordinary Namibians’ understanding of the importance of the United Nations as the authority that maintained their figurative separateness from South Africa, even as apartheid rule persisted. That figurative separateness had important long-term implications since it made it less likely that a future post-apartheid South Africa would rule a future independent Namibia.Footnote 32 However, in the immediate time horizon, Namibian nationalists grew increasingly frustrated with the slow pace and apparent futility of UN petitioning, as well as with Western governments’ backing for South Africa; thus, many sought support from alternative international backers. Kerina (then still with SWAPO) traveled to Sukarno’s Indonesia to study for his PhD at Padjadjaran University in Bandung and to seek international support;Footnote 33 Kozonguizi of SWANU went to communist China in 1960 to generate similar attention. While internal divisions within the members of the Namibian nationalist movement were externally portrayed as ideological, they were often personality driven.

While in Peking, Kozonguizi gave a radio speech in which he allegedly called the United States “imperialist” and the United Nations “incompetent.”Footnote 34 Subsequently, he argued that his words had been misquoted.Footnote 35 Yet, as the speech took on a life of its own, it was not the words that Kozonguizi may or may not have uttered but their reception and interpretation that mattered. For Western audiences, Vigne reported in 1961, “Kozonguizi’s Peking speech brought the Cold War to South West Africa.”Footnote 36

In addition to SWANU’s perceived communist affiliation, labor relations gave certain Western capitalists another reason to negotiate with SWAPO. As early as 1960, Newmont, the managing company of Tsumeb mine, held a meeting with the newly named SWAPO in New York City.Footnote 37 Newmont feared that SWAPO’s nationalist organizing in Tsumeb could help the labor union that was trying to organize the primarily Ovambo workers at the mine.Footnote 38 Three of the SWAPO representatives at this 1960 meeting were Nujoma, Kerina, and Jacob Kuhangua, while Newmont’s representative was its vice-president of global operations, Marcus Banghart (who was American). Banghart described SWAPO as potentially “dangerous.”Footnote 39 It was a movement Newmont needed to take seriously in its future planning. The specific outcomes from this meeting are not known. However, the absence of SWAPO support for trade unions in Namibia until the mid-1980s marked a striking silence in its nationalist history.Footnote 40

The disconnect between labor mobilization and SWAPO can appear counterintuitive because unionism and anticolonialism in many decolonizing contexts would seem to go hand in hand.Footnote 41 In particular, SWAPO’s predecessor organizations had their roots in the activism of Ovambo contract workers.Footnote 42 The 1950s-era advocacy for South West Africa included the work of South African trade unionist Ray Alexander (the partner of Jack Simons, noted earlier, who taught international law in his basement to Ya Toivo and other South West Africans in Cape Town) in Lüderitz Bay on the Atlantic coast of Namibia, where she organized workers in the country’s fishmeal and canning plants for the Food and Canning Workers Union.Footnote 43 However, unions could also be perceived as a potential threat because they provided an alternative source of popular mobilization to that of nationalist movements. It is not accidental that leaders of postcolonial states often clashed with trade unions as they attempted to consolidate their power after independence.Footnote 44

It suited some international backers of anticolonial nationalism to publicly blame SWANU’s alleged communism for their decision to back SWAPO in the early 1960s.Footnote 45 However, materially SWAPO had the potential to be the more useful partner, providing mining companies with a practical reason beyond Kozonguizi’s alleged communism to support SWAPO’s bid for leadership of the Namibian nationalist movement. This was a crucial moment before SWAPO’s dominance was assumed or assured: Hidden issues of labor relations, regional ethnic divisions, and resource extraction made SWAPO the more useful prospective working partner for Newmont and AMAX in the long term. At the same time, in 1960, it was not guaranteed that SWAPO would lead Namibian nationalism – nor was it foreseeable that Namibian independence was still thirty years away. Indeed, independence seemed on the horizon for the territory’s Copperbelt neighbors, where AMAX and other multinational mining companies had formed mutually beneficial relationships with emerging nationalist leaders, such as Kenneth Kaunda in soon-to-be-independent Zambia. Some mining companies had long-term goals of ongoing and future investment that stretched from the colonial through the postcolonial periods.Footnote 46 From this perspective, staying on the side of a potential, future government (and in the process, reinforcing that nationalist movement’s legitimacy against that of their competitors) was practical politics.

SWAPO and SWANU claimed to represent the same state-in-waiting. Throughout the Cold War period, any actual ideological differences between the two groups mattered much less than the external, international projection of “communist” or “capitalist” ideology onto them and how their leadership responded to that projection. Ethnicity remained a silent, though salient, category for popular mobilization, subsumed by the “national” label required for achieving international recognition of nationalist legitimacy. The significance (and arbitrariness) of that label as a requirement for such recognition showed the relationship between claims-making and international institutional legitimacy for nationalist movements. Claims of national sovereignty needed external recognition to have the potential to be realized, even when predicated upon ideals of national self-determination.

Public Claims-Making versus Private Advocacy

In 1962, SWAPO had one of its first reorganizations. Its president, Sam Nujoma, broke with Kerina “because he had written to AMAX asking for money without the consent and agreement of SWAPO.”Footnote 47 Nujoma made this statement in New Age, responding to an allegation made in that newspaper a month prior that SWAPO had expelled Kerina because the latter had been in negotiations with SWANU about merging the two organizations. Nujoma explained that, on the contrary, SWAPO had expelled Kerina because of his associations with Western capitalists rather than with alternative Namibian nationalists.Footnote 48 That explanation and the fact that Nujoma had published his remarks in New Age, a publication edited by Brian Bunting, a member of the by-then underground South African Communist Party, were both strong signals of SWAPO’s public anti-capitalist politics.

It was crucial for SWAPO to avoid the appearance of closeness to AMAX and other Western financial interests. In his public statement on Kerina’s expulsion, Nujoma mentioned that Kerina’s negotiations with AMAX ran counter to SWAPO’s position that “we do not commit ourselves to anything that might endanger the future of our country,” highlighting AMAX’s willingness to do business with the apartheid labor regime that controlled the staffing of Tsumeb mine.Footnote 49 Nujoma did not say that negotiating with AMAX was per se against SWAPO policy; rather, that Kerina’s doing so without permission was against SWAPO policy. He also ignored the fact that Newmont, not AMAX, managed Tsumeb, and that he and Kerina had negotiated with Tsumeb management two years prior to Kerina’s expulsion from SWAPO.Footnote 50 Because AMAX had a much larger international profile than Newmont, nationalist claimants often referred to AMAX as the owner of mining operations in which it was only a shareholder, instead of talking about the companies that actually managed specific mines – demonstrating the importance of Tsumeb mine as a focus of international attention as well as resource extraction.

During their Cape Town period in the late 1950s, Ya Toivo and Kozonguizi became friends and colleagues with a range of South African communists such as Brian Bunting and Jack Simons, as well as liberals such as Vigne. The divisions between white South African communists and liberals were not of critical importance to Namibian nationalists in their early Cape Town years.Footnote 51 The apartheid state’s crackdown in the early 1960s ended a period of “lawfare” where it had been possible for the anti-apartheid movement to use the courts to fight “for liberty” that could not be gotten “through legislation.”Footnote 52 Many South African advocates for both the anti-apartheid movement and Namibian nationalist claims-making went into exile after the apartheid regime’s bannings and imprisonments that followed the militant wing of the African National Congress (ANC)’s shift to violence in 1961 in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre.Footnote 53 (The ANC was the most prominent anti-apartheid organization in South Africa and has governed that country since 1994.) There was a degree of uneasiness between Namibian nationalists and the ANC. Namibian nationalists hesitated to incorporate the Namibian liberation struggle into the general anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, since they feared that a future Black majority–ruled South Africa would not be amenable to Namibian independence.Footnote 54 Yet in the early Cape Town years, Namibian nationalists worked fully with the South African anti-apartheid movement.

Throughout the 1960s, as many Namibian nationalist leaders were forced into exile by the South African government, they became participants in an anticolonial nationalist circuit of university education, military training, and expatriate living.Footnote 55 Kerina attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, also the alma mater for Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah, the first presidents of Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. SWAPO members congregated in Algeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and Angola for military training and organization.Footnote 56 Funding for these scholarships, training programs, and camps came from a patchwork of external backers and advocacy organizations – and included financial support from AMAX channeled through the African-American Institute (with whom AMAX shared board members), an American advocacy organization that facilitated connections between the United States and students and leaders from newly independent African states and states-in-waiting.

Internal divisions within the Namibian nationalist movement took on Cold War colors as nationalists looked for international advocates – who, in turn, supported nationalist claimants based on a combination of the latter’s perceived internal legitimacy, utility, and external position in the Cold War. By the late 1960s, SWAPO itself sought some communist backing (particularly from Cuba and China) but was likewise careful to distance itself from outright communist alignment so as not to alienate Western supporters.Footnote 57 While anticolonial nationalists attempted to manipulate Cold War tensions (with varying degrees of success), presenting dueling public and private faces to different strategic audiences, eventually their perceived position(s) within the Cold War alignment acted as a constraint on their possible actions. Kozanguizi’s Peking speech and its aftermath, which marginalized his political party, provides an example of how detrimental both the immediate effects and the aftereffects of this characterization could be.

This focus on public versus private ideological orientations can make it easy to brand certain anticolonial nationalists as opportunists rather than legitimate nationalists. Further, the communist-versus-capitalist binary can be misleading as an analytical framework for understanding decolonization struggles. It obscures nationalists’ own attempts to take advantage of the Cold War, sometimes by signaling support for one side or the other in order to attract external backing, other times by owning its idioms and expressions. From the mid-1970s onward, SWAPO often used the language of Marxist-Leninist nationalist liberation groups in its public statements.Footnote 58 This performance has continued well beyond the Cold War era: in his eulogy for Ya Toivo upon his passing in 2017, Namibian president Hage Geingob addressed him as “Comrade Andimba,” showing how liberationist political culture still permeated the organization’s public pronouncements.Footnote 59

AMAX and SWAPO

The impact of decolonization on resource extraction and land ownership was cast as a Cold War ideological contest between communism and capitalism by Great Power politics. In the early 1960s, the Congo Crisis, precipitated by Katanga’s attempt to break away from Congo-Léopoldville, provided the template for delegitimizing certain nationalists because of their close public association with Western capital. Within this environment, Namibian nationalists called attention to the continued imperialism of multinational mining companies and their interlocking directorates of shareholders, with a particular focus on Tsumeb Mine and AMAX’s holdings there.

In December 1962, the UN Committee on South West Africa held hearings focused on Tsumeb mine and the wider context of Southern African copper mining. The Moroccan representative on the committee asked about resource extraction and development in that territory. Michael Scott of the World Peace Brigade, speaking to the committee as the personal representative of the Herero Chief Hosea Kutako, quoted from “The Team Rules Mining in Southern Africa,” an article by the anthropologist and advocate Alvin Wolfe that heavily criticized AMAX.Footnote 60 This was at least the third time this article had been cited in testimony to a UN committee in a six-month period: Kenneth Kaunda of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia had referred to it in his April 1962 testimony on the mining companies who controlled resource extraction in the Copperbelt, and Scott had previously used it in testimony against Katanga during the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s.Footnote 61

During these December 1962 hearings, Kozonguizi of SWANU attacked US imperialism and neocolonialism, with a specific mention of AMAX and its subsidiary, Tsumeb Corporation.Footnote 62 Similarly, SWAPO submitted a sixty-page memo listing every foreign mining company with subsidiaries in South West Africa. These companies, the memo read, with their “giant, world-wide monopolistic interests and the influence that they wield in the political circles of their own countries, are partners in the invisible, internationalized forces which control the present and determine the future of South West Africa.”Footnote 63 Thus, Namibian nationalists – whether or not of rival organizations – and their advocates drew direct lines between resource extraction and Western capitalist support for apartheid, using a similar script to anticolonial nationalist critiques of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as well as of Katanga.

AMAX was not pleased when unnamed friends at the US Mission to the UN notified the corporation about Kozonguizi’s, Scott’s, and SWAPO’s statements at the December hearings. It submitted to the Committee on South West Africa a brief on Tsumeb Corporation, the details of US investment, and the limitations under which Tsumeb operated due to strictures of the South African regime.Footnote 64 As an addendum, AMAX noted the differences in the conditions of its employed African laborers in the Tsumeb region (very poor) and in its mines in (then) Northern Rhodesia (much better): the latter had become an example of how training and development programs might create a desegregated, highly skilled labor force. The company blamed the differences on the difficulties of dealing with the apartheid regime.

AMAX came away from the 1962 hearings of the UN Committee on South West Africa determined to be seen as supportive of certain anticolonial nationalists rather than as a backer of settler-colonial regimes. Three years later, in 1965, a year after Zambian independence, AMAX decided to “contribute to, rather than back away from, the forces for change” in Southern Africa, “this most backward part of the developing world.”Footnote 65 AMAX would “search out whatever opportunity exists to display in the explosive situation in South West Africa the same type of industrial statesmanship which has characterized [its] investment policy in Northern Rhodesia.”Footnote 66 Under this policy, AMAX hired the advocate Winifred Armstrong, who had previously served in an unofficial capacity for then US senator John F. Kennedy as an advisor on African politics. Her personal connections and friendships with particular African anticolonial nationalists were useful in pursuit of AMAX’s new policy of “industrial statesmanship.”

In 1960, working for Kennedy when he was president-elect, Armstrong had tried to ease visa restrictions and financial difficulties for UN petitioners from South West Africa.Footnote 67 At AMAX, she continued the company’s circumscribed support of particular South West Africans. Since 1962, according to an internal AMAX memo written in 1965, the mining company had committed nearly 9,000 USD “to assist in bringing South West Africans over to the US from Africa.” Another internal AMAX memo, written earlier in 1965, notes, however, that because of the “necessity to veil the source of the funds” from the eyes of the South African government – as well as because of the relatively modest amount of the funds – “their public relations impact has been limited.”Footnote 68 Namibian nationalists continued their refusal to publicly participate in AMAX-sponsored scholarship and development programs, nor did AMAX want to be directly linked to such support.

In 1965, Jacob Kuhangua of SWAPO privately asked AMAX for money to build and maintain a Dar es Salaam refugee center.Footnote 69 For AMAX, it was crucial that “the money should be used through some responsible agency,” not received from the corporation directly. The company justified its assistance because “even though the fortunes of the exiled parties … may be at a low ebb at present … they might be of future importance.”Footnote 70 Once again the Cold War context came into the picture: Erasmus Kloman Jr., an investment economist at AMAX, wrote in a confidential memo that Namibian nationalists in Dar es Salaam “ought not to be so highly dependent on help from the East”; instead, “they ought to be helped by the Western private sector.”Footnote 71 For AMAX, the ideal model of US political aid was that provided by private enterprise and channeled through responsible nongovernmental organizations like the African-American Institute, an entity in which it exerted influence. The company was careful to support leaders whom it believed to be moderate, anticommunist, and nonviolent – in its view, peaceful political transition would lead to peaceful mining, preferably without nationalization of industry.

Kuhangua never got to run an AMAX–African-American Institute–SWAPO refugee center in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 72 The center was never built, and for good reason: neither SWAPO nor AMAX wanted to take the risk of making their connection public. However, their negotiations over the center showed how nationalist claimants and their international advocates embarked on complex dances of private alignment and public divergence.

AMAX’s limited, careful advocacy had repercussions for the shape of the Namibian nationalist movement, not because it gave that movement substantial support but because of how that support was construed from the outside. As described earlier, Nujoma, the head of SWAPO, had publicly blamed his split with Kerina on the latter’s negotiations with AMAX. The South West African Authority (which governed South West Africa for the apartheid regime) knew about AMAX’s advocacy and used it to exacerbate inter-Namibian rivalries. One of their informal advocates told Kozonguizi of SWANU that South Africa’s “intelligence service … had learned of the relationship between SWAPO representatives in New York with AMAX” through “Top Secret correspondence between the African-American Institute and the AMAX.”Footnote 73 Kozonguizi was told that both US organizations were helping SWAPO because they considered SWAPO “pro-West in outlook, as against SWANU’s hostile attitude towards the West.”Footnote 74 While South African interests were hardly a reliable, disinterested source for AMAX’s relations with SWAPO, it is telling how they found the issue of AMAX and African-American Institute’s support useful to exacerbate fractures within the Namibian nationalist movement. Paradoxically, South Africa also characterized SWAPO as “communist” – another example of the strategic malleability of the “communist” and “capitalist” labels.

Like South Africa, AMAX kept itself informed about internal Namibian nationalist rivalries. Kerina, expelled from SWAPO, came looking for support from AMAX in 1966 for his own political projects. He expressed “high regard for the Hochschilds,” the brothers who had held leadership roles at the corporation, but he felt that AMAX, through its financial contributions, was becoming dangerously aligned with SWAPO.Footnote 75 Winifred Armstrong, as AMAX’s representative, clarified to Kerina that AMAX did not contribute to SWAPO but, rather, to the African-American Institute. She also made a note to AMAX management that the US State Department, the American Committee on Africa (an American anti-apartheid advocacy organization led by George Houser), and the foreign ministries of many Southern and Central African states regarded Kerina as “a double-dealer” and that his “many statements need to be taken with caution.”Footnote 76

In contrast, when Kuhangua of SWAPO came to AMAX asking for funding for the refugee center in Dar es Salaam, he mentioned that he understood AMAX’s “policy of contributing only to organizations which administer or sponsor programs in which [it was] interested.”Footnote 77 In making a subsequent funding request, Kuhangua also indicated “that the mines will be equally if not more important to an independent South West Africa than they are at present,” assuring AMAX of his and Nujoma’s pro-American credentials.Footnote 78 Shortly thereafter, Kuhangua was knifed on the streets of Dar es Salaam by another member of SWAPO. Armstrong visited him in the New York City hospital where he was being treated; she noticed that Kuhangua’s SWAPO colleagues were taking advantage of his disability to sideline him within the nationalist movement.Footnote 79

The South West Africa Case at the International Court of Justice

Back in 1957, Reverend Michael Scott had presented a memo to Ghana’s new president, Kwame Nkrumah, on bringing the case of South West Africa to the International Court of Justice. In the memo, Scott argued that South West Africa was South Africa’s Achilles heel – thus, it could be a backdoor to dismantling the growing structures of apartheid.Footnote 80 He suggested that such a case would show that South Africa had violated the “sacred trust” of the League of Nations mandate through apartheid rule and by its refusal to relinquish the territory.Footnote 81

Scott’s plan was not taken up until the pivotal year of 1960, when the UN General Assembly declared national self-determination an international norm. Moving to assert that norm, Ethiopia and Liberia, as African countries that had been members of the League of Nations, instituted proceedings against South Africa in the International Court on behalf of South West Africa.Footnote 82 The case challenged the legitimacy of South African rule of the territory and became the central piece of international advocacy on behalf of Namibian nationalist claims-making. After the case was taken up, Scott played a much less active role in Namibian claims-making. He did not enjoy warm relations with SWAPO, since he remained closer to the Herero Chiefly leadership and was skeptical of what he perceived as SWAPO’s domination of other Namibian ethnic groups.Footnote 83 He placed his faith in the International Court to carry out a nonviolent international-legal strategy in pursuit of Namibian independence.Footnote 84

Yet even Scott had doubts about the various structures he had hoped could resolve nationalist claims of self-determination. He pondered how “we” – the international community of the United Nations and the circle of civil society advocates with whom he worked (through its interstices) – can “write a Charter to promote human rights, and then proceed to ask for a committee to define them, for a Court of Justice to interpret them. That way lies disaster …”Footnote 85 Scott left a telling ellipsis after this statement, refusing to engage with the alternative to these international-legal structures, even as he critiqued them.

The South West Africa case at the International Court was the second major international institutional confrontation between South Africa and newly (or soon-to-be) independent nations, confrontations that illuminated the United Nations’ potential to address questions of national liberation, self-determination, and discrimination in Southern Africa.Footnote 86 The first occurred in 1946 when Mrs. Pandit, pre-independent India’s ambassador to the United Nations, brought up the issue of discrimination against South Asians in South Africa.Footnote 87 Among other sources, she used testimony procured by Scott, from when he worked in his parish in the Johannesburg slum of Tobruk during the 1940s; this testimony showcased the historical collaboration between Indian politicians and Western advocates as well as the utility of the United Nations as a forum to support anticolonial nationalism. It also began the process of making South Africa a pariah state in postwar international politics.

The International Court’s South West Africa case was a significant intervention, with far-reaching impact. In 1962, the Court issued an advisory opinion that seemed favorable to the plaintiffs (Ethiopia and Liberia) and gave certain Namibian nationalists observer status at the Court. Those given observer status included Nujoma of SWAPO but not Kozonguizi of SWANU, lending legitimacy to the former and undermining that of the latter. Then, in 1966, the Court handed down a surprise split verdict against the norm of self-determination, stating that the plaintiffs had no standing, having not established “any legal right or interest” in the case.Footnote 88 This “nondecision” closed the possibility that the United Nations institution could – or would – formally address and successfully arbitrate the legitimacy of nationalist claims.

During the case, both supporters and opponents of anticolonial nationalism and Namibian independence used intermediaries to provide evidence and testimony to international political and legal circles – the former against and the latter in favor of South Africa’s continued control over South West Africa. South Africa employed their own missionary-anthropologist who argued for the legitimacy of apartheid, or “separate development,” as “respectful” modernization that did not mean abandoning the “sacred heritage” of particular ethnic groups.Footnote 89 This emphasis on the categorization and “protection” of particular Namibian communities in South Africa’s testimony was drawn from the Odendaal Commission (1964), a South African enquiry into the organizational and ethnic composition of South West Africa carried out for the purpose of preventing “the emergence of nationalism.”Footnote 90 The Odendaal Plan outlined an organizational system for Namibia based around politically “independent” territorial entities. Namibian nationalists viewed Odendaal as a classic colonial “divide and rule” ethnic strategy. It linked ethnicity to territory in a manner meant to undercut the territorial foundations of the nationalist movement – which were, ironically, the structure of the Mandate.

At the International Court, South Africa’s main source for up-to-date information on Namibian nationalism was Kurt Dahlmann, the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung, Windhoek’s German-language newspaper. Dahlmann immigrated to Namibia in 1958; as a former Second World War Luftwaffe pilot with his own airplane and a West German passport, he was one of the very few pro-apartheid white South West Africans or South Africans who had the means and documentation to travel around the decolonizing African continent. Flying himself, he attended most of the independence festivities across the continent and personally conversed with many of the Namibian nationalists in exile.Footnote 91

In this way, Dahlmann became South Africa’s “native political parties” expert for their case at the International Court of Justice, submitting a report that concluded, “Ethiopia and Liberia were opposed to any factual enquiry into the situation in South West Africa.”Footnote 92 Instead, he wrote, their case rested on “the theory that an international legal norm [of national self-determination] exists which is objectively determinable.”Footnote 93 Dahlmann questioned whether a people who lacked independence were necessarily oppressed, arguing that Namibian nationalists and their advocates had to make the case that oppression was the issue at hand, and that it existed in South West Africa. And if South Africa had to disprove “oppression” for the Court to rule in its favor, it could (and did) do so by discrediting the reliability of Namibian claimants at the UN. Therefore, the disorganization and in-fighting within the Namibian nationalist movement and their (according to Dahlmann) “exaggerated” claims at the UN mattered when judging the legitimacy of their cause. However, if the issue were the international-legal definition of South West Africa’s status – mandate? independent state? South African province? – then what happened inside the territory did not matter.

In brief, under Dahlmann’s reasoning, if the issue were how, rather than that, South Africa ruled South West Africa, then it was necessary for Namibian nationalists to provide proof that South African rule oppressed people living in South West Africa. This, of course, was rather difficult for Namibian nationalists to do since, by 1966, those in a position to give testimony to the UN and the International Court had been in exile for a number of years. Parsing through the layers of obfuscation of what apartheid rule actually meant for black and mixed-race peoples in Namibia, Dahlmann made a pointed observation about the components of legitimacy for nationalist claims in international politics: Was South African rule itself illegitimate? Or was it how South Africa ruled South West Africa that was illegitimate? If the latter, how could evidence provided by “disorganized” nationalist factions, whose leaders lived in exile, demonstrate what the “Namibian people” “legitimately” felt? Dahlmann expressed concern about the legitimacy of Namibian nationalist claims-making in order to undermine any genuine discussion on the topic of Namibian independence. Nevertheless, the question that hid beneath his derailment of that primary issue was one with which advocates of independence themselves grappled: What were the components of legitimate nationalism?

Conclusion

Global structural forces of resource extraction and power politics shaped the actions of nationalist claimants, their advocates, and their opponents during postwar decolonization, an era when territorial control and international institutional recognition of “legitimate” states seemed to shift from year to year, or even week to week. The often-violent transition from colony to state mapped the boundaries of independent states onto regions with a host of internal nationalist claims.

Namibia’s nationalist movement was shaped by factors that included Cold War politics, the territory’s lucrative natural resources, its status as a former League of Nations mandate, the leadership of rival nationalist groups, and the complex networks of its international advocates that navigated between these spheres. That Namibia was a former mandate with its own UN committee, combined with its natural resources – a combination not present for many states-in-waiting – greatly influenced the strategies and networks involved in Namibia’s struggle for independence.

Material interests and ideological concerns are rarely separate spheres of political action.Footnote 94 The long, drawn-out, nearly thirty-year international advocacy campaign for international economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa demonstrated how material and ideological pressure points could be combined to generate political action.Footnote 95 In Namibia, Tsumeb mine became important to Namibian nationalist claims-making in part because it was a productive copper mine in a region whose labor force shared ethnicity with the dominant Namibian nationalist movement. In addition, the mine became a site for Western attention and therefore the potential of Western intervention in the politics of the region. Namibian nationalists and their international advocates attempted to harness the power of capital to serve their struggle for independence. Throughout this process, unofficial advocates facilitated the negotiations between capitalists and nationalists, which were often secret. That nationalists and advocates hid their affiliations with capital did not undercut the moral dimension of much of their work nor enable one to write off individual achievements as substitutes for state or corporate power – to do so would critically simplify the complex analytical and political terrain on which they operated.

South West Africa, as a former League of Nations Mandate rather than an official colony of South Africa, was, in Namibian nationalist Jacob Kuhangua’s words, “neither territory nor nation” but an artificial creation, “an international balancing act that could not endure” in the long term.Footnote 96 South West Africa’s artificial international creation as a former mandate provided the foundation for its nationalist claims-making – a strategy that made nationalists extremely reliant on international advocates for the invitations, passports, visas, and funding required to access the United Nations and its related organizations. Advocacy (corporate, civil society, governmental, international institutional) had a significant role maintaining South West Africa/Namibia’s territorial integrity because it was originally an international structure. Namibian nationalists were well aware of the precarious, double-edged benefit of their status as a former international Mandate, which combined the promise with the original denial of national self-determination.Footnote 97

Footnotes

3 The Anti-Algiers

1 M. C. Chagla letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, July 7, 1960: “India represents the credo of nationalism and has given to the world the philosophy of peaceful co-existence.” Correspondence File 705, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers post-1947, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter, “Nehru Papers”).

2 The Indian Union territory of Puducherry had been bureaucratically united with India since 1954, but the international-legal handoff between France and India occurred in 1963. The colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial dimensions of these entanglements are described in Jessica Namakkhal, Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

3 J. P. Narayan, Keynote address from Gandhigram Conference, December 1960, Devi Prasad Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (hereafter, “Devi Prasad Papers”).

4 Gandhi allegedly coined the specific term Shanti Sena, or “peace army,” near the end of his life, as he was trying to rally a voluntary peacekeeping force to halt communal violence in Northern India; on the relationship between Gandhian nonviolence and the threat of violence, see Judith Brown, “Nonviolence on Trial,” in Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 314–95; Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 165.

5 On Gandhi in South Africa: Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (New York: Random House, 2014); Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

6 On the Indian independence movement as a site for transnational advocacy, see Muhammad Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah, eds., The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2016); Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sandipto Dasgupta, “Gandhi’s Failure: Anticolonial Movements and Postcolonial Futures,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (2017): 647–62; Rikhil Bhavnani and Saumitra Jha, “Gandhi’s Gift: Lessons for Peaceful Reform from India’s Struggle for Democracy,” Economics of Peace and Security Journal 9, no. 1 (2014): 80–92; Azar Ahanchi, “Reflections of the Indian Independence Movement in the Iranian Press,” Iranian Studies 42, no. 3 (2009): 423–43.

7 Albert Bigelow (a Quaker, former member of the US Navy, later an anti–nuclear weapons activist), Siddharaj Dhadda (an Indian lawyer who resigned from the Congress Party in 1957, entering informal politics as one of JP’s lieutenants in the Sarvodaya movement), Stuart Morris (a prominent member of the British pacifist Peace Pledge Union, imprisoned during the Second World War for corresponding with the Indian independence movement), G. Ramachandran (who sat on the Gandhi Memorial Foundation), Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland (US civil rights activists), as well as Devi Prasad (who eventually became head of War Resisters’ International). Elements of this community (including Scott and Sutherland) had formed the Sahara Protest Team, organizing a march from Ghana to protest French nuclear testing in the Sahara desert in 1959, see Robert Skinner, “Bombs and Border Crossings: Peace Activist Networks and the Post-colonial State in Africa, 1959–1962,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (July 2015): 418–38.

8 Gandhi allegedly came up with the idea of sarvodaya in 1903 while reading John Ruskin’s series of essays Unto the Last (1862) on an overnight train from Durban; M. K. Gandhi, Autobiography: Story of My Experiences with Truth (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1948), 265. In 1908, Gandhi published a translation of Ruskin in Gujarati titled Sarvodaya. On the economic aspects of the Sarvodaya movement, see Narayan Desai, Gramdan: The Land Revolution Movement in India (London: War Resisters’ International, 1969).

9 The other being Vinobha Bhave, the Indian social reformer.

10 Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Indian Nationalism and the ‘World Forces’: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007): 325–44.

11 Nico Slate, “From Colored Cosmopolitanism to Human Rights: A Historical Overview of the Transnational Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 1, no. 1 (2015): 3–24.

12 Albert Bigelow, “Some Reflections on the Lebanon Conference to Establish the World Peace Brigade,” 1961. World Peace Brigade North American Regional Council [NARC] Papers, Box 2, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI (hereafter, “WPB NARC Papers”).

13 Bigelow, “Some Reflections.”

14 The term “transnational advocacy network” was coined by Margaret Keck and Katherine Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

15 Regarding the British imperial sphere, see Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019) and Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a global cross-section, see Erez Manela and Heather Streets-Salter, eds., The Anticolonial Transnational: Networks, Connections, and Movements in the Making of the Postcolonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

16 A sampling of this rich literature includes Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis, eds., The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022); Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-colonialsm in Africa and the West, 1918–1938 (London: Hurst, 2008); Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

17 This framework was first described by Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur 14, no. 118 (August 14, 1952): 14. In the subsequent decades, the hierarchy imbedded in notions of a First, Second, and Third World have made them contested political terms. Here, they are used in their contemporary context, rather than the meanings the terms took on over time.

18 Asha Devi Aryanayakam, “Notes on Talks with Vinoba on World Peace and the World Peace Brigade,” February 1, 1961, File 46, Devi Prasad Papers.

19 Nat Hentoff, Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Leah Danielson, American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). A. J. Muste’s personal papers are held by the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and are available on microfilm.

20 Jo Ann Robinson, Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 118.

21 Udi Greenberg, “The Rise of the Global South and the Protestant Peace with Socialism,” Contemporary European History 29, no. 2 (2020): 202–19.

22 Jennifer Davis, eulogy, November 6, 2015, George Houser Memorial Service, Union Theological Seminary, New York City. Davis was executive director of the American Committee on Africa, 1981–2001.

23 General Records of the US Department of State, 1955–1959. Series 791.5/7-356 to 791.00/11-3056 contains innumerable allusions to JP as the most likely successor to Nehru as Indian prime minister. JP’s extensive collection of personal papers are at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

24 Suresh Ramabhai (Suresh Ram), Vinoba and His Mission: Being an Account of the Rise and Growth of the Bhoodan Yajna Movement, foreword by S. Radhakrishnan, introduction by J. P. Narayan (Sevagram: Akhil Bharat Sarva Seva Sangh, 1954). Suresh Ram was heavily involved in the World Peace Brigade.

25 Bill Sutherland to Michael Scott, January 26, 1963, on JP’s contacts in Nairobi, Box 2, WPB NARC Papers.

26 Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 307–16, details JP’s political thought while he was incarcerated during the Emergency.

27 Lydia Walker, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the Politics of Reconciliation for the Postcolonial State and Its Imperial Fragments,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 56, no. 2 (2019): 147–69.

28 Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 69–132.

29 Arjun Das, Quaker International Centre, Delhi, Gandhigram Conference report, January 8, 1961. American Friends Service Commission Archives, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter, “AFSC Papers”).

30 Transcript of Press Conference Held by Prime Minister at Vigya Bhavan on January 18, 1961, File 713, Part 1, Nehru Papers. Scott assured Nehru that he did not support Naga independence, and broached the topic of some form of international civil society commission to broker a deal between Naga nationalists and the Indian government. According to Scott, Nehru seemed open, interested, and noncommittal; see, Das, “Report on the Gandhigram Conference”; Michael Scott to Rev. Layton P. Zimmer, January 25, 1961, Box 31, GMS Papers. According to Nehru, Scott was well meaning but misguided: Nehru to General SM Shrinagesh, Governor of Assam, January 24, 1961, File 713, Part 3, Nehru Papers.

31 The specific start-and-end locations of the planned march remained unspecified.

32 George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar Es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

33 James R. Brennan and Andrew Burton, “Emerging Metropolis: A History of Dar es Salaam, 1862–2000,” in Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging Metropolis, ed. Burton Brennan and Yusuf Lawi (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2007), 13–75.

34 Issa Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman, and Ng’wanza Kamata, Julius Nyerere: Development as Rebellion, vols. 1–3 (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2020). Many thanks to Issa Shivji for outlining this collaborative biographical project and its source base during my 2016 research trip to Dar es Salaam.

35 Emily Callaci, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

36 James R. Brennan, “The Secret Lives of Dennis Phombeah: Decolonization, the Cold War, and African Political Intelligence, 1953–1974,” International History Review 43, no. 1 (2021): 153–69.

37 “Civitas” is the descriptive term for the World Peace Brigade used by A. J. Muste; see, Bigelow, “Some Reflections.”

38 A. J. Muste letter to North American Regional Council Members, July 30, 1963, Box 2, NARC Papers.

39 Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyers, Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa (Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2000), 63.

40 Christian Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 65–93; Michael Panzer, “Building a Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-State, 1964–1968,” Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 5–23; George Roberts, “The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the Politics of Exile in Dar es Salaam,” Cold War History 17, no. 1 (2017): 1–19.

41 Andrew Ivaska, “Liberation in Transit: Eduardo Mondlane and Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, and Joanna Waley-Cohen (London: Routledge, 2018); Philip Muehlenbeck and Nathalie Telepneva, eds., Warsaw Pact Intervention in the “Third World”: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London: IB Tauris, 2018).

42 Andy DeRoche, “Dreams and Disappointments: Kenneth Kaunda and the United States, 1960–1964,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 6, no. 4 (2008): 375.

43 DeRoche, “Dreams and Disappointments,” 375. According to A. J. Muste, “Kaunda, on Principle, and Nyerere, on Personality” supported the project, which was primarily staffed by Suresh Ram, Rustin, Scott, and Sutherland; see, Sutherland and Meyers, Guns and Gandhi in Africa, 63.

44 “A Disciple of Gandhi: Kenneth Kaunda,” New York Times, April 18, 1962.

45 DeRoche, “Dreams and Disappointments,” 371. While Kaunda was successful in his international performance, he had a more complicated relationship with the liberalism espoused by the Brigade community: as early as autumn 1963, a year before he assumed power as the first president of Zambia, Kaunda signaled his interest in dissolving rival political parties, so that soon-to-be independent Zambia would be a one-party state; see, Bizeck Jube Phiri, “The Capricorn Africa Society Revisited: The Impact of Liberalism in Zambia’s Colonial History, 1949–1963,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (1991): 82. Under Kaunda, Zambia became a one-party state in 1972.

46 On multiracialism and political organizing in the run-up to Zambian independence, see Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar, and Giacomo Macola, eds., Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

47 On the evolution of South African diplomacy regarding the decolonization of the Central African Federation: Jamie Miller, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Struggle for Survival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Julia Tischler, Light and Power for the Multi-racial Nation: The Kariba Dam in the Central African Federation (London: Palgrave, 2013). Over time, South Africa gradually distanced itself from Southern Rhodesia after its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (1965), and came to favor anticommunist, weaker Black regimes such as Malawi’s. This evolution put more pressure on Kaunda’s Zambia, leading him to crack down on the Southern African liberation movements; Paul Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Détente: Genesis of the SWAPO ‘Spy Drama,’ Part I,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no. 1 (1990): 69–86; and Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Détente: The Genesis of the SWAPO ‘Spy Drama,’ Part II,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no. 2 (1991): 42–58.

48 Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), captures this contingency.

49 Miles Larmer, Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia (London: Ashgate, 2011), 32.

50 “Michael Scott Is Far Too Busy in Dar,” Sunday News (Tanganika), May 6, 1962, University of Dar es Salaam East Africana Collections, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Also, “Rhodesia Tensions Rise,” New York Times, May 5, 1962; “Marchers Wait for the ‘Signal,’” Observer, March 4, 1962.

51 Larmer, Rethinking African Politics, 51.

52 In a hasty, barbed note to Scott in the spring of 1963, A. J. Muste expressed his “continued regret that conditions … made it impossible for [Scott] to remain in Africa last year.” Muste said that he “recognize[d] that the situation might not have provided any opening for” the Brigade; “[o]n the other hand,” he wrote, “it might have”; see A. J. Muste note to Michael Scott, May 24, 1963, Box 1, WPB NARC Papers.

53 This process is described more fully in Chapter 4, “The Spectre of Katanga.”

54 Bill Sutherland to A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Michael Scott, September 16, 1962, Box 1, WPB NARC.

55 Bill Sutherland letter to Michael Scott, January 26, 1963, Box 1, WPB NARC; Sutherland alluded to his alcoholism, which became a liability to the project.

56 Bill Sutherland letter to A. J. Muste, May 31, 1963, Box 1, WPB NARC Papers.

57 Muste letter to Suresh Ram, undated, probably fall 1963, Box 1, WPB NARC Papers.

58 Barbara Deming, “International Peace Brigade,” Liberation (Summer 1962), Swarthmore Library Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

59 Deming, “International Peace Brigade.”

60 Deming, “International Peace Brigade.”

61 After his stint in Rhodesia, Loft served as the director of the Quaker program at the UN (1961–1963) and the vice-president of the African-American Institute (1963–1966).

62 George Loft letter to Sir Evelyn Horn, January 2, 1960, International Service Division, 1960. Latin America Program, Africa Program Box, File 62968, AFSC Papers. “The Federation” was the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963), which was made up of what are currently Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi.

63 Poll options included sympathy for the Tatum family’s “multi-racialist” point of view; no sympathy, but respect for their right to entertain whomever they liked in their own home; and no sympathy as well as a request for the Tatums to move.

64 Tatum poll info, October 1960, File 62968, AFSC Papers. Lucie White shows that expressions of generational connection to Rhodesia made by white settlers were more imaginary than real. White, Unpopular Sovereignty, 4: “Of the seven hundred original pioneers who arrived in 1890, only fifteen lived in the country in 1924.” “There were almost equal numbers of white immigrants and white emigrants for most of the early 1960s.”

65 Lyle Tatum letter to A. J. Muste and Bill Sutherland, July 19, 1962, Box 3, WPB NARC Papers.

66 Tatum letter to Muste and Sutherland, July 19, 1962.

67 A. J. Muste letter to Lyle Tatum, April 18, 1962, Box 3, WPB NARC Papers. Emphasis in original.

68 White chooses not to use the term “settler colonialism” in part to sidestep this conversation: Unpopular Sovereignty, 25.

69 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

70 Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

71 Robert S. Steinbock, letter to the editor, Friends Journal, December 1, 1962. All quotes from Steinbock in this chapter are from this source.

72 Arlo to Lyle Tatum, April 7, 1961: “We are in hopes that the Brigade could offer its unarmed service in the areas of tension and conflict to the UN … It would give the UN a choice of sending armed or unarmed persons into a particular area and I scarcely see how it could be less successful in the Congo than sending in armed men with instructions not to use their weapons.” File 45B, Devi Prasad Papers.

73 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Murderous Angles: A Political Tragedy and Comedy in Black and White (New York: Little, Brown, 1968).

74 J. Wayne Fredericks, US Department of State to Colin Legum, July 7, 1967. “Visas for Rev. Scott can never be considered entirely routine.” Box 5, GMS Papers.

75 “13e Sessie van die V.V.O.: Suidwes-Afrika Aangeleenthede,” November 8, 1958. Annexure V. AS Series (SWAS) 373 File AS.50/2/3/2 (v. 2), National Archives of Namibia.

76 For example, Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Committee on Africa, and the Friends Service Committee all had to testify in 1968. Hearings, Reports and Prints of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).

77 Winifred Armstrong interview with author, June 21, 2015.

78 Lydia Walker, “The Unexpected Anticolonialist: Winifred Armstrong, American Empire, and African Decolonization,” in Manela and Streets-Salter, The Anticolonial Transnational, 199–218.

79 Winifred Courtney, “Kennedy’s New Frontier,” Africa South in Exile 6, no. 1 (1961): 104.

80 Courtney, “Kennedy’s New Frontier,” 105.

81 Courtney, “Kennedy’s New Frontier,” 105.

82 Arlo Tatum to Stephen Cary, June 29, 1961, File 45 B, Devi Prasad Papers.

83 Allegations unearthed in Sol Stern, “NSA and CIA,” Ramparts Magazine, March 1967, 29–39, and subject to a US Congressional inquiry that year. Tity de Vries, “The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal: Catalyst in a Transforming Relationship between State and People,” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 1075–92.

84 The literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Cold War is broad and growing. Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War: The Limits of Making Common Cause (London: Routledge, 2016); Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2013 [1999]). On the relationship between transnational socialist, noncommunist networks and the Cold War, see Su Lin Lewis, “‘We Are Not Copyists’: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019): 402–28.

85 For an example of such criticism of Rustin, Sutherland, and Scott, see State Department Decimal Files, 745c.00/2-2362, Deputy Director for Eastern and Southern African Affairs William Wight to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Henry Tasca, February 23, 1962, quoted in DeRoche, “Dreams and Disappointments,” 375. By the early 1960s, most members of the World Peace Brigade were prohibited from entering both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

86 Times of India, April 30 1967.

87 Jeffrey James Byrne, “Our Own Special Brand of Socialism: Algeria and the Contest of Modernities in the 1960s,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 433.

88 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

89 John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

90 Ramachandra Guha, Rebels against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022). The activities of such figures as C. F. Andrews, Annie Besant, Samuel Stokes, and Marjorie Sykes exemplify this history.

91 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in India and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

92 Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism.

93 Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 202–42.

94 Carolien Stolte, “Introduction: Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019): 331–47.

95 Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa-Essays on Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 219–24. Walter Rodney, Terence Ranger, John Saul, among others, congregated at the University of Dar es Salaam, and Bill Sutherland stayed in the city after the Brigade left, joining this liberationist intelligencia.

96 Sutherland to Muste, May 31, 1963, Box 1, WPB NARC Papers.

97 Thomas Molony, Nyerere: The Early Years (London: James Currey, 2014).

98 Seth Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).

4 The Spectre of Katanga

1 Terence Ranger, Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957–1967 (Harare: Weaver Press, 2013), 28.

2 Cyril Dunn, “Who Is the Judge to Gripe? Observer, December 8, 1963.

3 Brooks Marmon, “The Controversial Life and Death of Paul Mushonga,” New Frame, January 29, 2020. Available at www.newframe.com/the-controversial-life-and-death-of-paul-mushonga/.

4 Renamed the “Africa-America Institute” in 1997. F. Taylor Ostrander, “HKH as a Businessman,” in Harold K. Hochschild 1892–1981, ed. Adam Hochschild (Dexter, MI: Thomson-Shore, 1982), 99. Privately published family memorial book. I am grateful to Jennifer Hochschild for sharing this book with me.

5 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4–16, provides an overview of scholarship on the political economy (and choice of that term) of colonial to postcolonial Africa. For discussion of AMAX’ interests in Katanga, see Footnote Introduction, footnote 53.

6 Harold Hochschild to Adlai Stevenson, December 12, 1963, in Hochschild, Harold K. Hochschild, 79.

7 “Evolution of the Recent Attacks on Mining Companies Operating in Southern Africa,” AMAX unauthored report, December 1962, Box 25, Winifred Armstrong Papers, Hoover Institution (hereafter “WA Hoover Papers”). Armstrong started working at AMAX in 1965, so she herself did not write or have any input into this report.

8 There was also a neighboring colony of French Congo, which became independent Congo-Brazzaville (or the Republic of the Congo) in April 1960.

9 Michel Streulens, La Relève, August 27, 1960.

10 Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). For an examination of the colonial period and the different Congolese independence movements, see Isidore Nadaywel è Nziem, Histoire générale du Congo: De l’héritage ancien à la République Démocratique (Brussels: De Boeck & Larcier, 1998).

11 Josiah Brownell, Struggles for Self-Determination: The Denial of Reactionary Statehood in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

12 Alanna O’Malley, The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis 1960–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

13 “Congo Toilers” is a term used by Cordier in his correspondence. For example, Cordier to Bunche, acceptance of Invitation, December 30, 1960, Box 104, Cordier Papers, Columbia University. This group included the Americans Ralph Bunche (UN mediator for Palestine, innovator behind the concept of UN Trust Territories, and undersecretary general for the UN); Andrew Cordier (original chief negotiator for the UN in Congo, undersecretary for the UN General Assembly, and also Hammarskjöld’s conduit to the US government); Hammarskjöld’s Africa expert, Heinze Wieschhoff, an Austrian naturalized–US citizen and anthropologist who had last visited the Congo in the 1920s; Indians C. V. Narasimhan, a career UN civil servant, later a special representative to the Congo, and Major General I. J. Rikhye, who wrote the military manual used by the UN mission; Frances Nwokedi (the first Nigerian UN permanent secretary) and Robert Gardiner (founder of the Ghanaian civil service, later a special representative to Congo), who both handled Congolese civilian development and economist Alexander MacFarquhar, a Scot who spent his career in the British Indian civil service, was secretary of commerce for the newly independent Pakistan and eventually a UN undersecretary.

14 Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994 [1972]), 400.

15 Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 322.

16 Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, 322.

17 Belgian agents killed Lumumba while he was in Katangese custody. Release of Belgian and US records in 2002 show that while the CIA very much wanted to oust Lumumba, it was probably not directly involved; see Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2002). De Witte is quite disparaging of the US and the UN but sees no planned collusion. The specifics of Cordier’s role in January–February 1961 are murky, as is Cordier’s general role at the UN as Hammarskjöld’s number two, with close ties to the US government. Cordier has often been described, even if obliquely, as a CIA plant at the UN, including in Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 268.

18 George Ivan Smith to David Owen, “Report on Nyasaland and Rhodesia,” p. 5, June 1, 1962, Box 125, Cordier Papers.

19 Quoted in Edgar O’Ballance, The Congo-Zaire Experience, 1960–1998 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 47.

20 Caroline Hoskyns, The Congo since Independence, January 1960–1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 411. Examples of articles in Libre Belgique (August 31, 1961) and the Daily Telegraph (August 30, 1961). F. Edward Griffen’s film Katanga: The Untold Story of UN Betrayal (1962), is also a piece of this publicity campaign. In addition, Katanga sponsored trips for US congressmen and senators to the region.

21 “Mr. Streulens sounds like a very brash young man and we’ll probably be hearing a lot more from him.” Andrew Cordier to Leo Malania, September 19, 1960, Box 161, Cordier Papers. Struelens wrote a scholarly account of the UN intervention in Congo, Michel Struelens, The United Nations in the Congo or O.N.U.C. and International Politics (Brussels: Max Arnold, 1976).

22 The network of African American advocates for apartheid South Africa deserves exploration. Yergan’s biography – David Henry Anthony, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York: New York University Press, 2006) – spends a chapter on his political shift rightward but does not mention his friendship and work with Jay A. Parker, the African American conservative intellectual, lobbyist for Southern African bantustans, and fellow member of the African American Affairs Association advocacy organization. Parker’s influence stretches further in African American conservative thought, as he is invoked in the few public speeches of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and was described by Thomas’s wife, Ginni, as “a lifelong friend, mentor, encourager and father figure” for Clarence; Ginny Montalbano, “The Conservative Legacy of Jay A. Parker,” Daily Signal, February 27, 2019. Available at www.dailysignal.com/2019/02/27/the-conservative-legacy-of-jay-a-parker/.

23 Americans for Katangese Freedom pamphlet, July 20, 1962, Box 43, Marvin Liebman Papers, Hoover Institution.

24 George Ivan Smith to David Owen, “Report on Nyasaland and Rhodesia,” p. 5.

25 “Report on Nyasaland and Rhodesia,” p. 7.

26 Ruth Alexander, Mirror, October 21, 1962, Box 43, Marvin Liebman Papers.

27 Charles Willoughby to Max Yergan, December 30, 1961, Box 43, Marvin Liebman Papers.

28 Ryan Irwin, “Sovereignty in the Congo Crisis,” in Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence, ed. Elisabeth Leake and Leslie James (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 203–18.

29 Charles P. Henry, ed., Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 189.

30 Robert Trinquier, Jacques Duchemin, and Jacques Le Bailly, Notre guerre au Katanga (Paris: Éditions de la pensée moderne, 1963), 53–77.

31 Terry McNamara interview, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project. Conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy, March 18, 1993. Library of Congress, American Memory Collections. Also, “Report on Nyasaland and Rhodesia.”

32 Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 85.

33 Stephen D. Krasner, “The Hole in the Whole: Sovereignty, Shared Sovereignty, and International Law,” Michigan Journal of International Law 25, no. 4 (2004): 1075–101.

34 Urquhart, Hammarskjöld, 392. Tshombe also invoked the Battle of Bunker Hill in his propaganda films.

35 David Halberstam, New York Times, June 13, 1962.

36 Tshombe’s political party was the Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga, in contrast to Lumumba’s Mouvement National Congolais–Lumumba.

37 Miles Larmer and Eric Kennes, “Rethinking the Katangese Secession,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 4 (2014): 741–61.

38 It is unclear if these military operations had Hammarskjöld’s direct permission. O’Brien said they did, in his To Katanga and Back, 283. However, this statement is unconfirmed outside of O’Brien’s account, and Hammarskjöld died before he could verify it.

39 For detailed accounts of the run-up to Hammarskjöld’s death and various theories involved, see Arthur Gavshon, The Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold (New York: Walker Publishing, 1962); Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa (London: Hurst & Company, 2011); Ravi Somaiya, The Golden Thread: The Cold War Mystery Surrounding the Death of Dag Hammarskjöld (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021).

40 Ludo de Witte, “The Suppression of the Congo Rebellions and the Rise of Mobutu, 1963–1965,” International History Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 107–25.

41 Winifred Armstrong, recorded interview by Stephen Plotkin, July 8, 2008, p. 4. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston (hereafter, “JFKL”).

42 Armstrong CV, Correspondence 1960 File, Box 2, Winifred Armstrong Papers, JFKL.

43 Winifred Armstrong interview with author, February 4, 2018.

44 Winifred Armstrong, “Issues at the UN of Particular Concern to African States: Conclusions and Further Recommendations,” December 1960, Position Paper, p. 19. Armstrong Papers, JFKL.

45 Winifred Armstrong interview with author, December 18, 2020.

46 A. J. Muste (1886–1967) was a US Christian pacifist leader who headed the Quaker-oriented activist organization Fellowship for Reconciliation, among others; Michael Scott (1907–1983) was a British anti-apartheid activist who headed the Africa Bureau, a London-based African advocacy organization. Both were leaders of the World Peace Brigade (the subject of Chapter 2).

47 Armstrong, “Issues at the UN,” 20.

48 Edward Kennedy was not himself yet a senator; he was elected as the US senator from Massachusetts in 1962.

49 Armstrong interview with the author, November 28, 2015; Armstrong interview with the author, February 4, 2018.

50 Theodore Geiger and Winifred Armstrong, The Development of African Private Enterprise (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1964), 138–48.

51 Also known as the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514.

52 Eva-Maria Muschik, “Special Issue Introduction: Towards a Global History of International Organizations and Decolonization,” Journal of Global History 17, no. 2 (2022): 181.

53 Report cowritten by J. P. Narayan, Bill Sutherland, and Michael Scott, “World Peace Brigade Submission to the UN Special Committee of 17 on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” 1962, p. 3, File 442, J. P. Narayan Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

54 Kaunda testimony to Special Committee of 17, April 19, 1962, Lowenstein Papers, Subseries 2.11, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library.

55 Kaunda testimony to Special Committee of 17, April 24, 1962, Lowenstein Papers, Subseries 2.11. The article is: Alvin Wolfe, “The Team Rules Mining in Southern Africa,” Toward Freedom 11, no. 1 (1962): 1–3.

56 Special Committee of 17 on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, September 7, 1962, verbatim record of the 103rd meeting. Allard Kenneth Lowenstein Papers, Subseries 2.11.

57 F. Taylor Ostrander, “AMAX Internal Memo to Management,” November 26, 1962, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers.

58 AMAX, “Evolution of the Recent Attacks on Mining Companies Operating in Southern Africa,” December 1962, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers. This private report is an internal AMAX document written before Armstrong worked for the company.

59 AMAX, “Evolution of the Recent Attacks.”

60 The Rhodesian Selection Trust was renamed the “Roan Selection Trust” in 1964 and became a “wholly owned subsidiary” of AMAX in 1970. Alexander R. Hammer, “Selection Trust Will Be Subsidiary of Climax under Zambia Plan,” New York Times, March 7, 1970.

61 Michael Scott, undated (probably 1962) note titled “Draft-Confidential.” Box 63, Guthrie Michael Scott Papers, Weston Library, Oxford.

62 F. Taylor Ostrander to Ronald L. Prain, December 5, 1962, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers. This document is AMAX correspondence before Armstrong worked for the company.

63 Ronald Prain to Michael Scott, April 4, 1963, Box 66, GMS Papers.

64 L. J. Butler, “Business and British Decolonisation: Sir Ronald Prain, the Mining Industry and the Central African Federation,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, no. 3 (2007): 465.

65 Duncan Money, “The World of European Labor on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt,” International Review of Social History 20 (2015): 238.

66 Ronald Prain to Harold K. Hochschild, April 26, 1950, Ronald Prain Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, cited in Butler, “Business and British Decolonisation,” 461.

67 Harold K. Hochschild to Ronald Prain, September 6, 1955, Prain Papers, cited in Butler, “Business and British Decolonisation,” 465.

68 Poster, the World Peace Brigade, October 22, 1962, Winifred Courtney Papers, African Activist Archive, Michigan State University. Available at https://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=210-808-7873.

69 Scott, Special Committee of 17 to Monitor the Declaration on the Granting of Independence, 173, BB/0991, National Archives of Namibia.

70 Scott, Special Committee of 17 to Monitor the Declaration, 173.

71 Lazlo Passemiers, Decolonisation and Regional Geopolitics: South Africa and the “Congo Crisis,” 1960–1965 (London: Routledge, 2019).

72 Ismay Milford, “Federation, Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in 1950s East and Central Africa,” Historical Journal 63, no. 2 (2020): 1325–8.

73 George Ivan Smith to David Owen, Report on Nyasaland and Rhodesia, p. 5, June 1, 1962, Box 125, Cordier Papers.

74 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 107.

75 Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 141.

76 Jacob Kuhangua testimony to Special Committee of 17 to monitor the Declaration on the Granting of Independence, p. 187, BB/0991, National Archives of Namibia (NAN).

77 Kuhangua to Special Committee of 17, p. 188, BB/0991, NAN.

78 Kuhangua to Special Committee of 17, p. 442, BB/0991, NAN. Italics added.

79 Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, p. 141.

80 In the 1950s, US senator Joe McCarthy sparked an era of paranoia known as “McCarthyism,” or the “red scare,” by claiming that communists had infiltrated the US government.

81 Transcript from 2004 Wilson Center Congo Crisis Workshop, Herbert Weiss, p. 83. (Hereafter, cited as “Transcript, Speaker, page number.”)

82 Quoted in Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, 334.

83 Transcript, Devlin, p. 23. Union Minière helped the US build the atomic bomb; and the US often used international missionaries as lobbyists within the UN General Assembly.

84 O’Brien, To Katanga and Back, 19. Italics in original.

85 John Kennedy to JM Swing, Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service (drafted by Armstrong), January 15, 1960, Box 3, Winifred Armstrong Papers, Schomburg Center for Black Culture, New York City.

86 Including Sam Nujoma, Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, as well as the Herero and Nama chiefs. Mburumba Kerina to Winifred Armstrong, December 21, 1959, Box 3, Armstrong Schomburg Center Papers.

87 John Kennedy to Christian Herter, letter (drafted by Armstrong), undated, probably January 1960, Box 3, Armstrong Schomburg Center Papers.

88 These notions of respectable leadership also held for how Soviets chose to back particular nationalist leaders; Andrew Ivaska, “Leveraging Alternatives: Early FRELIMO, the Soviet Union, and the Infrastructure of African Political Exile,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 41, no. 1 (2021): 11–26.

89 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963); Julius K. Nyerere, “A United States of Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 1, no. 1 (1963): 1–6.

90 Brian Urquhart, “Mobutu and Tshombe: Two Congolese Rogues” (undated), Character Sketches: UN News Centre. Available at https://news.un.org/en/spotlight/character-sketches-joseph-mobutu-moise-tshombe-brian-urquhart.

91 David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

92 Winifred Armstrong interview with author, February 4, 2018.

5 Capital and Claims-Making

1 Winifred Armstrong, notes on conversation, October 28, 1958, Box 3, Winifred Armstrong Papers, Schomburg Center for Black Culture, New York City.

2 Regarding terminology of South West Africa/Namibia: The UN General Assembly adopted the name “Namibia” in 1966. Mburumba Kerina allegedly coined the name “Namibia” in conversation with Sukarno (the first president of Indonesia) sometime between 1960 and 1961; by 1962 many Namibian nationalists used it, but it was not agreed upon by all. There are arguments against using the term “South West Africa” because of potentially providing legitimacy to an apartheid state, and against using the term “Namibia” anachronistically, before it was in common use, and also arguments about when common use occurred in the years before 1966. In States-in-Waiting, I use the terms “Namibia” and “South West Africa” in analytical rather than strictly chronological context, in order to refer to nationalist conceptions of the territory versus those of international law.

3 John Dugard, “The Revocation of the Mandate for South West Africa,” American Journal of International Law 62, no. 1 (1968): 78–97.

4 Peter H. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Paris: UNESCO, 1988); John Dugard, The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writings on the Controversy between South Africa and the United Nations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 129–66.

5 Charles Maier, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 268–69.

6 Sidney L. Harring, “The Constitution of Namibia and the ‘Rights and Freedoms’ Guaranteed Communal Land Holders: Resolving the Inconsistency between Article 16, Article 100, and Schedule 5,” South African Journal on Human Rights 12, no. 1 (1996): 468–71; Robert J. Gordon, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).

7 There are different mining laws in South Africa. Government of South Africa, “Minerals and Mining Policy of South Africa: Green Paper.” Available at www.gov.za.documents/minerals-and-ming-policy-south-africa-green-paper.

8 Stephanie Quinn interview with Christina and Julianne Somes, Tsumeb, March 2016, from Quinn, Labor, Urbanization, and Political Imagination in Namibia, 1943–1994, dissertation, Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2019, p. 63.

9 Quotes from John Ya-Otto, cowritten with Ole Gjerstad and Michael Mercer, Battle-Front Namibia (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1981), 13. Reflections upon the size of Tsumeb town from Walker, personal visit, July 2015.

10 Ya-Otto quote, in Ya-Otto with Gjerstad and Mercer, Battle-Front Namibia, 13.

11 Ya-Otto quote, in Ya-Otto with Gjerstad and Mercer, Battle-Front Namibia, 13.

12 Raymond Mikesell, The World Copper Industry: Structure and Economic Analysis (New York: RFF Press, 2013), appendix 1-1, Profiles of Selected Major Private Copper Producing Companies. Descriptions of the financials of Tsumeb mine in Dennis McCarthy, International Business History: A Contextual and Case Approach (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 1994), 184–85. For an anti-apartheid activist report on Tsumeb mine with specific numbers they received from AMAX itself, see Tami Hultman and Reed Kramer, Tsuemb: A Profile of United States Contribution to Underdevelopment in Namibia (1973), African Activist Archive, Michigan State University.

13 Harold K. Hochschild was chairman of AMAX board until 1957, when his brother Walter took over until Walter’s retirement in 1966. Harold K. also was a member of the board of the African-American Institute from 1954 for nearly a decade. On the Northern Rhodesian labor “template,” see Harold K. Hochschild, “Labor Relations in Northern Rhodesia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 306 (1956): 43–49.

14 Newmont also operated Okiep copper mine in South Africa and had interests in particular Zamibian copper mines, while AMAX operated particular Zambian mines and had shareholding interests in Tsumeb as well as Okiep.

15 Dates for the founding and the specific name of the Ovamboland People’s Congress or Organization range from 1957 to 1959. Mburumba Kerina, “A Brief History of the South West Africa People’s Organisation,” undated (likely August 1, 1960), gives the founding date as 1958. 372 File AS.50/2/3/2 (v.2), National Archives of Namibia South West Africa Secretariat AS-Series (hereafter, “NAN SWAS”). Andimba Toivo ya Toivo gave the date as 1957; Ya Toivo interview with the author, July 29, 2015. Ya Toivo passed away on June 9, 2017; I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and interview him.

16 A clear overview of the founding of and contestation between SWAPO and SWANU is in Lauren Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia: War by Other Means (Basel: P. Schlettwein, 1998), 27–32. In his study, Tony Emmett, Popular Resistance and the Roots of Nationalism in Namibia, 1915–1966 (Basel: P. Schlettwein, 1999), argues that there were three groups involved in post-1945 Namibian petitioning: the “traditional” leadership (the Herero Chiefs’ Council, who spoke through Michael Scott at the UN), contract workers (SWAPO), and the student diaspora (SWANU). Emmett shows how conflicts between these factions led to disunity and eventually to the rise of SWAPO as the dominant nationalist organization, but he also imposes a division between the SWANU “intelligentsia” and the labor-dominated SWAPO that simplifies their competitive dynamic. This reading has shaped much of the historiographical understanding of SWAPO-SWANU rivalry because of the importance of Emmett’s work and the use of his rich interview collection by subsequent scholars.

17 Toivo ya Toivo interview, July 29, 2015. Also referred to in Ray Alexander’s Oral History, University of Cape Town Historical Collections. Simons and Alexander were placed on successive South African banned lists after 1952 and were kicked out of the country in 1965. Simons also provided a history, political economy, and international law curriculum to African National Congress nationalist insurgents in Zambian camps. Syllabus is in Simons’s papers at the University of Cape Town’s Historical Collections, if these papers were not damaged by the 2021 fire.

18 Ya Toivo interview, 29 July 2015.

19 Ya Toivo interview, 29 July 2015; Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, Kaxumba kaNdola Man and Myth: The Biography of a Barefoot Soldier (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2005).

20 Kozonguizi formed SWANU before the Ovamboland People’s Organization rebranded itself as the explicitly nationalist SWAPO. While there are differing accounts for the inability of SWAPO and SWANU to fuse into a single, long-lasting nationalist movement, the divisions were fueled by ethnic and personal tensions, particularly between Kerina and Kozonguizi. Ronald Dreyer, Namibia and Southern Africa: Regional Dimensions of Decolonization (London: Routledge, 1994), 34.

21 A primary document that outlines this narrative is Sam Nujoma and Mburumba Kerina, “A Brief History of the South West African People’s Organization – 1 August 1960,” SWAS 372 File AS.50/2/3/2 (vol. 2), NAN. Thank you to Bernard C. Moore for sharing this collection. A synthesis of this nationalist historiography is described in Bernard C. Moore, Stephanie Quinn, William Blakemore Lyon, and Kai F. Herzog, “Balancing the Scales: Re-centering Labour and Labourers in Namibian History,” Journal of Southern African Studies 47, no. 1 (2021): 1–4.

22 Kerina to Ya Toivo, November 17, 1959, letter confiscated from Ya Toivo by SW African Authority, AACLRS.013, Box 2 Exhibit G, National Archives of Namibia (hereafter, “NAN”). Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia, 44, cites an excerpt from this letter.

23 Kerina to Ya Toivo, November 17, 1959.

24 UN General Assembly, Report of the Good Offices Committee on South West Africa, October 30, 1958, A/RES/1243. Available at www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f07780.html.

25 UN General Assembly, Report of the Good Offices Committee on South West Africa.

26 I am grateful to Bernard Moore for articulating this point.

27 “Petition from the National Executive of the South West African National Union (SWANU) sent to U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations from Windhoek on 15 September 1968,” in The African Liberation Reader, ed. Aquino de Braganca and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Zed Press, 1982), 191–92.

28 “Petition from the National Executive,” 191.

29 Kerina identifies as half Ovambo, half Herero, and was able to pass as mixed race to sneak out of South West Africa in 1952.

30 Report of Randolph Vigne to National Committee, Liberal Party of South Africa, March 1961, p. 5. NAN, AACRLS 96 (hereafter, “Vigne March 1961 Report”). On some of the local politics concerning the prospect of UN intervention, see Molly McCullers, “‘The Time of United Nations in South West Africa Is Near’: Local Drama and Global Politics in Apartheid-Era Hereroland,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 371–89.

31 Vigne March 1961 Report, p. 5. I think Vigne exaggerates, because he was not allowed to spend time in Ovamboland, which was the location of most SWAPO support.

32 Mburumba Kerina interview with the author, May 4, 2016, where he recounted a conversation with Michael Scott that if the former League of Nations mandate dissolved and South West Africa became a fifth province of South Africa under international law, then there was no way a theoretical post-independent, democratically elected South African government would relinquish the territory.

33 Interview with Kerina, May 4, 2016.

34 Speech repeatedly described in: Kozonguizi to Brian Bunting Correspondence, October–November 1960, Brian Bunting Collection, Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape. Also, Ruth First, South West Africa (New York: Penguin, 1963), 206–7. A transcript of this may be included in “Text of a Radio Broadcast Dated 19 August 1960, SW African National Union Chairman Interviewed in Peking” or “Text of a Radio Broadcast Dated 28 August 1960, Recorded Speech by Jariretundu Kozonguizi, President of the National Union of South West Africa” – both collected from UN General Assembly Committee on South West Africa, October 27, 1960, AC.4/447. From “Letter from the Permanent Representative of the Union of South Africa with Enclosures,” held in Allard K. Lowenstein papers, Subseries 2.11, UNC-Chapel Hill Wilson Library. Also available through Aluka digital library.

35 Kozonguizi tapes 1, TPA 48.4, Tony Emmett Interviews/Papers, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, Switzerland.

36 Vigne March 1961 Report, p. 6.

37 M. D. Banghart and F. A. Scheck, “Memorandum: Conference with Four Representatives of SWAPO,” September 26, 1960. SWAS 372 File AS.50/2/3/2 (v. 2), NAN. Thank you to Bernard Moore for sharing this document.

38 Banghart and Scheck, “Memorandum.” This meeting is also described in Moore et al., “Balancing the Scales,” 1–2.

39 Banghart and Scheck, “Memorandum.”

40 Gretchen Bauer, Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), 45. The Mine Workers Union of Namibia was not founded until 1986, though a general strike occurred earlier – in 1971–1972. For an excellent study of the interplay between apartheid-state labor control and categorization, ethnic identity, and nationalism in Tsumeb, see Stephanie Quinn, “Infrastructure, Ethnicity, and Political Mobilization in Namibia, 1946–87,” Journal of Southern African History 61, no. 1 (2020): 45–66.

41 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gareth Curless, “The Sudan Is ‘Not Ready for Trade Unions’: The Railway Strikes of 1947–1948,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 5 (2013): 804–22; Gareth Curless, “Introduction: Trade Unions in the Global South from Imperialism to the Present Day,” Labor History 57, no. 1 (2016): 1–19.

42 Nujoma and Kerina, “A Brief History.”

43 Namibia: One Hundred Years of Struggle and Hope (Philadelphia, PA: American Friends Service Committee, 1989), Ruth Brandon Papers, African Activist Archive, Michigan State University.

44 For example, Kenneth Kaunda’s main political opponent, Frederick Chiluba, ran the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions from 1974 to 1991, before becoming president of Zambia. Julius Nyerere described strikes as “evil things” or “the law of the jungle,” in Issa Shivji, Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania, 1920–1964 (London: James Currey, 1986), 227. For Namibia, see Pekka Pelota, The Lost May Day: Namibian Workers Struggle for Independence (Jyväskylä: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1995).

45 The Organization of African Unity recognized SWAPO as the sole legitimate authority in Namibia in 1968, the date when SWAPO’s dominance of Namibian nationalism is usually charted. It is ironic that SWAPO was chosen by particular international advocates in the early 1960s as the noncommunist option within the Namibian nationalist movement when, by the 1970s, it would be identified with communism and, by the 1980s, identified by US president Ronald Reagan as a “Marxist-terrorist band”; Michael McFaul, “Rethinking the ‘Reagan Doctrine’ in Angola,” International Security 14, no. 3 (1990): 131. For the larger regional context of SWAPO’s alliance with Cuba during the 1970s and 1980s, see Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

46 Saima Nakuti Ashipala, “Sovereignty over Diamond Resources: (Re)-Negotiating Colonial Contracts in Southern Africa,” in Cultural Sovereignty Beyond the Modern State, ed. Gregor Feindi, Bernhard Gissibl, and Johannes Paulmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 65–86.

47 Sam Nujoma, “Kerina Expelled from SWAPO,” New Age, November 8, 1962.” Historical Collections, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa: “Mr. Kerina was officially expelled from SWAPO on October 20, 1962 at the meeting of SWAPO held at the UN headquarters in New York.”

48 Years later, Kerina, adrift from SWAPO, ironically turned to the political heirs of the right-wing, anticommunist, US-based clique that had advocated for an independent Katanga in the early 1960s. He asked them for financial support in return for providing material for anti-SWAPO pamphlets. National Community to Restore Internal Security, “A Citizen’s Inquiry on Namibia and SWAPO,” Kerina testimony, July 1981. PA/1117, NAN.

49 Nujoma, “Kerina Expelled from SWAPO.”

50 Banghart and Scheck, “Memorandum.”

51 Ya Toivo with the author, 29 July 2015.

52 Leon Levy with the author, 14 August 2015.

53 At Sharpeville, South African police officers in a Black township killed 69 people who were peacefully protesting apartheid segregation laws. Simon Stevens, “The Turn to Sabotage by the Congress Movement in South Africa,” Past and Present 245 (2019): 221–55; Humphrey Tyler, Bernardus G. Fourie and Patrick Duncan, “Sharpeville and After,” Africa Today 7, no. 3 (1960): 5–8.

54 Interview with Mburumba Kerina, 4 May 2016.

55 Studies of other African anticolonial nationalists on this circuit include Ismay Milford, African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar Es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). This was the first wave of Namibian nationalist exiles, which was mostly made up of SWAPO and SWANU leadership. The majority of exiles, drawn from the rank and file of the movement, left the country 1974–1976, after Angolan independence meant a less secure northern border.

56 Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 249; Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Auckland Park: Jacana Media, 2009); Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom; Christian Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

57 Chris Saunders, “Namibian Diplomacy before Independence,” in Namibia’s Foreign Relations, ed. Anton Bösl, André du Pisani, and Dennis U. Zaire (Windhoek: MacMillian Education Press, 2017), 30.

58 Ilina Soiri, The Radical Motherhood: Namibian Women’s Independence Struggle (Oslo: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996), 66.

59 Dr. Hage G. Geingob, “Eulogy to Cde. Herman Toivo Ya Toivo: A Life of Distinguished Service,” June 23, 2017. Available at www.facebook.com/notes/dr-hage-geingob/eulogy-to-cde-herman-toiyo-ya-toivo-a-life-of-distinguished-service/835039316652560/.

60 Alvin Wolfe, “The Team Rules Mining in Southern Africa,” Toward Freedom, 11, no. 1 (1962): 1–3.

61 Kaunda testimony to Special Committee on Decolonization, April 24, 1962, Lowenstein Papers, Subseries 2.11. Scott’s testimony is described in F. Taylor Ostrander, “AMAX Internal Memo to Management,” November 26, 1962, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers.

62 AMAX, “Evolution of the Recent Attacks on Mining Companies Operating in Southern Africa,” December 1962, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers.

63 AMAX, “Evolution of the Recent Attacks.” The SWAPO memo that is quoted in the internal, unauthored AMAX memo of December 1962 is also included in the Peter Katjavivi microfilms collections, PA 1/8/1.

64 AMAX, “Evolution of the Recent Attacks.”

65 Erasmus H. Kloman, Jr, AMAX internal memo, May 25, 1965, Box 25, Armstrong Hoover Papers. This was before AMAX hired Winifred Armstrong, first on a short-term contract in summer 1965. Kloman joined the US Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, wrote his University of Pennsylvania dissertation on financial investment in West Africa, then worked at CIA, the Department of State, and AMAX (1961–1966). He wrote a contemporaneous article, “African Unification Movements,” International Organization 16, no. 2 (1962): 387–404, that analyzed the difficulties of newly independent African states to work together on common economic problems.

66 Kloman, AMAX internal memo, May 25, 1965.

67 Winifred Armstrong, “Issues at the UN of Particular Concern to African States: Conclusions and Further Recommendations,” December 1960 position paper, p. 20. Armstrong Papers, JFKL.

68 Erasmus H. Kloman, Jr., confidential memo, March 17, 1965, Box 2, Armstrong Papers, the Hoover Institution.

69 Kloman, confidential memo, March 17, 1965.

70 Kloman, confidential memo, March 17, 1965.

71 Kloman, confidential memo, March 17, 1965.

72 Armstrong interview, February 4, 2018.

73 Kurt Dahlmann, “One Man Many Parties: The Parties of the Non-Whites in SWA,” undated manuscript used in South Africa’s South West Africa International Court of Justice testimony, pp. 14–15. Kurt Dahlman Papers, PA 85, Basler Afrika Bibliographien.

74 Dahlmann, “One Man Many Parties,” pp. 14–15.

75 Armstrong to F. T. Ostrander, February 17, 1966, Box 2, Armstrong Papers, the Hoover Institution.

76 Winifred Armstrong to Harold K. Hochschild, June 28, 1966, Box 2, Armstrong Papers, the Hoover Institution.

77 Armstrong to Hochschild, June 28, 1966.

78 Winifred Armstrong to F. T. Ostrander, August 4, 1966, Box 2, Armstrong Hoover Papers.

79 Winifred Armstrong, undated note, late 1966, Box 2, Armstrong Hoover Papers.

80 Michael Scott, A Time to Speak (London: Farber and Faber, 1958), 350; Chris Saunders, “Michael Scott and Namibia,” African Historical Review 39, no. 1 (2007): 35.

81 Scott, A Time to Speak, 35.

82 Scott, A Time to Speak, 40.

83 Examples of this perception in Scott’s papers include Hosea Kutako to Scott, October 6, 1955, Box 74. Transcript of Cyrill Dunn interview with David Astor, May 10, 1975; and Scott editorial in the Times (of London) on Kutako’s death, August 15, 1970, both Box 5, GMS Papers.

84 Anne Yates and Lewis Chester, The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle against Injustice (London: Aurum Press, 2006), 271.

85 Scott, A Time to Speak, 239; Scott published his memoir two years before the International Court of Justice took up the South West Africa case.

86 Teresa Barnes, “‘The Best Defense Is to Attack’: African Agency in the South West Africa Case at the International Court of Justice, 1960–1966,” South African Historical Journal 69, no. 2 (2017): 162–77.

87 Manu Baghavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2012), covers Indian internationalism during the liberation movement and in the first decade of independence, with an emphasis on Mrs. Pandit’s role. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 152–58, describes how Indian pressure prevented the UN from acquiescing to South Africa’s annexation of South West Africa.

88 Spender ruling in Dugard, The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, 261.

89 Robert Gordon, “Anthropology at the World Court: The 1966 South West Africa Case,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 31, no. 1 (2004): 1–11, and Robert Gordon, “The Making of Modern Namibia: A Tale of Anthropological Ineptitude?,” Kleio 37, no. 1 (2010): 26–49, detail the work of Johannes Petrus van Schalkwyk Bruwer, an expert witness for the South African government at the International Court. International Court of Justice, Pleadings, Oral Arguments, Documents. South West Africa Cases (The Hague: International Court of Justice, 1966), p. 263.

90 Timoteus Mashuna, “The 1978 Election in Namibia,” in Re-Viewing Resistance in Namibian History, ed. Jeremy Sylvester (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015), 178.

91 Author conversation with Dag Henrichsen, the archivist for Dahlmann’s papers, May 25, 2016.

92 Dahlmann, “One Man Many Parties,” Conclusions, p. 3.

93 Dahlmann, “One Man Many Parties.”

94 As exemplified by the New International Economic Order, a collaborative set of proposals in the 1970s from countries in the Global South to revise the postwar economic settlement for more favorable trading dynamics; see Amy Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); “Special Issue: The New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015); Christy Thornton, “A Mexican International Economic Order? Tracing the Hidden Roots of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States,” Humanity 9, no. 3 (2018): 389–421; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) 142–75.

95 Simon Stevens, Boycotts and Sanctions against South Africa: An International History, 1947–1970, PhD dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University, New York, 2016; Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner, eds., A Global History of Anti-Apartheid: “Forward to Freedom” in South Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

96 Kuhangua, UN Committee to Monitor the Declaration on the Granting of Independence, p. 442, BB/0991 NAN.

97 Molly McCullers, “Betwixt and Between Colony and Nation-State: Liminality, Decolonization, and the South West Africa Mandate,” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (2019): 1704–8.

Figure 0

Map 3.1 Decolonizing Southern Africa, c. 1960–1964.

Map by Geoffrey Wallace
Figure 1

Figure 3.1(a) A. J. Muste, 1965;

Figure 2

Figure 3.1(b) Jayaprakash Narayan, 1975;

Figure 3

Figure 3.1(c) Michael Scott (center) with Bertrand Russell, 1961.

Getty Images
Figure 4

Figure 5.1 Tsumeb Mine, 2015.

Photo: Lydia Walker

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  • International Advocacy
  • Lydia Walker, Ohio State University
  • Book: States-in-Waiting
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009305815.006
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  • International Advocacy
  • Lydia Walker, Ohio State University
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  • International Advocacy
  • Lydia Walker, Ohio State University
  • Book: States-in-Waiting
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009305815.006
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