In 1961, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination generated major protests globally, and a tacit support from leaders in the Global North. Why had Lumumba become such a perceived threat to international security? To analyze these dynamics, Gerits argues that decolonization had its particular Pan-African ideological formulation that transcended Cold War paradigms. It was a battle fought in terms of cultural diplomacy from the Global North (European imperial powers and Cold War superpowers), and political independence and sovereignty from the Global South (mostly African and Asian leaders). Educational and cultural assistance became a space for defining the terms of decolonization and liberation. Gerits’s book is a welcome addition to the dynamic literature on the formation of the “Third World” and the “Global South,” which centers African leaders and thinkers.
The ambition of the project is evidenced by the source base, which includes archives in France, the US, UK, Zambia, Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Belgium. The bulk of the archives remains those of European and American provenance that have been interestingly rethought to highlight how African leaders advocated for cultural unity. Each of the eight chapters provides an original reformulation of key moments of the 1950s and 1960s, including the Bandung Conference, Pan-African critiques of French nuclear tests in Algeria, and the Congo Crisis. Chapter One shows how, in the post-World War II period, psychology became the framework through which many Global North politicians and policymakers sought to shape “African hearts and minds” and African political leaders aimed to build new nations. Through media, imperial powers and African anticolonial thinkers strove to fashion the parameters of decolonization.
These debates about anti-colonial modernity start, in Chapter Two, at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, where African and Asian delegates developed a project of modernity that sought to break away from colonial development. Strategic policies in the Global South repurposed European, Soviet, and American aid and cultural diplomacy, to often unexpected ends, as Global North policymakers misunderstood Bandung as a “cry for improved assistance” (61). Chapters Three and Four highlight how Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah used cultural diplomacy to define this anti-colonial modernity through Radio Ghana and Bureau of African Affairs newspapers and pamphlets. For Nkrumah, nonalignment needed to focus on building federations of liberation, as evidenced by support of Guinea’s departure from the French Union in 1958. This goal of using cultural diplomacy and media to build a liberationist project came to a head over the nuclear bomb test in Algeria. Ghana’s media campaigns against French tests forced American and British policymakers to make public pronouncements. Ultimately, Gerits shows the strategic alliances built during the period of decolonization worked to define the terms of African sovereignty, outside of Cold War paradigms.
The Congo Crisis in 1960–61 serves as a major turning point in Gerits’ analysis, as the context of Congolese independence and Katanga’s secession led Global North policymakers to frame the crisis as the product of “unstable postcolonial state led by a liberationist demagogue” (104). Education remained a favored solution to resolving the crisis. Nevertheless, its failure, Gerits argues, shifted development policies from a psychological to a socio-economic approach. Chapter Six explores this realignment, based on the uncertainty about media’s ability to inspire revolution, leading to the increase of European or American technical advisors. In response, Julius Nyerere or Kwame Nkrumah sought to use aid strategically, by trying to avoid aligning themselves with its ideological underpinnings. Chapter Seven shifts gears to analyze debates about development and anti-colonial modernity in Southern Africa by focusing on Zambia Broadcast Corporation’s efforts to consolidate Pan-Africanism against settler rule, in South Africa and Rhodesia. The disagreements between Kuanda and other African leaders to fight white settler rule put to the test the project of anti-colonial modernity. Anti-colonial modernity came to a close in the mid-1960s, as African leaders sought new strategies to bolster their sovereignty, turning to Cold War ideologies and regional federations.
As an exploration of a particular legacy of African unity and Global North responses to this project, the book places Nkrumah as the main architect of this anti-colonial modernity. This raises the question of what analyzing this moment from Addis, Dakar, or Cairo might tell us about Pan-African models of the 1950s–60s. For all the lofty dreams of using cultural diplomacy and assistance as a means of leveraging power, one has the sense that these projects remained fairly limited, especially compared to military assistance. Some numbers would have helped to highlight the scale of these programs. Furthermore, it is somewhat surprising that language policy and translation of radio shows in African languages are absent from the diplomatic discussions of cultural centers and educational policy. Much of the anti-colonial modernity explored seems to have largely focused on the formation of an anti-colonial elite: how far did this influence of “hearts and minds” actually extend?
The Ideological Scramble for Africa is a compelling analysis of the ways strategic choices by African leaders and responses from the Global North, particularly in matters of cultural diplomacy, shaped the modern international system. The project captures the optimism, radicalism, and negotiations of the 1950s and 1960s, which were soon foreclosed by the early 1970s.
