¹ For more on the “new diplomatic history,” see some of the scholarship/literature featured at https://newdiplomatichistory.org/.

² Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974).

³ Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Times Books, 1992).

⁴ For the Devlin account, see Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: A Memoir of 1960–67 (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

⁵ Cohen’s previous books include Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, 1st ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and The Mind of the African Strongman: Conversations with Dictators, Statesmen, and Father Figures (Washington, DC: Vellum, 2015).

⁶ For a few accounts of these other attempts in the French West African context, see Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) and Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For the Organization of African Unity and other efforts at worldmaking, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Klaas van Walraven, Dreams of Power: The Role of the Organization of African Unity in the Politics of Africa, 1963–1993 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).