1. These matters are all discussed at length in Rotberg, , Things Come Together: Africans achieving greatness in the twenty-first century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and need not be developed afresh in this essay.

2. For a representative set of these prejudices, see the caustic quotations from American legislators in Meriwether, James H., Tears, Fire, and Blood: the United States and the decolonization of Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 150–1)Google Scholar.

3. Interview with Kenneth Kaunda, 20 February 1959.

4. Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia Shall be Free (New York: Praeger, 1962, 146).

5. For a description of the colour bar in Northern Rhodesia, see Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: the making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873–1964 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, 201–2, 254–72).

6. Quoted in Rotberg, ‘Gandhi's tactics pushed in Africa’, New York Times, 24 February 1959.

7. Interview with Kapwepwe, 16 November 1962, Lusaka.

8. Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955, 9–10, 14).

9. Transcription of taped interview between Rotberg and Wina, 14 December 1967.

10. Quoted in H. Masauko Chipembere (ed. R.I. Rotberg), Hero of the Nation: Chipembere of Malawi, an autobiography (Blantyre: Christian Literature Association Malawi, 2001, 148).

11. For the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, and its internal battles, see Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa, 289–91.

12. For details of the conclave of nationalists that led to the official declaration of an emergency throughout the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in February 1959, see Rotberg, Overcoming the Oppressors: White and Black in Southern Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022, forthcoming).

13. I spoke with Kamuzu Banda on a number of occasions, in Cambridge, MA, and in Limbe and Lilongwe in Malawi. But he was hardly youthful during the liberation struggle, so I include nothing from my interviews here.

14. For details of Banda's subversion of democracy and of the cabinet crisis that plunged Malawi into combat, see Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa, 317–21.

15. Chipembere, Hero of the Nation, 96. Chipembere and I conversed often in Zomba, Dar es Salaam, Cambridge, MA, and Chocorua, NH. He wrote his biography in longhand, often after those discussions. I therefore draw on his autobiography, not specifically on separate interviews. Ericka Albaugh managed with great skill to turn his handwritten manuscript into a publishable text (which I edited and introduced).

16. Chipembere, Hero of the Nation, 119.

17. Interview with Chisiza, 8 August 1962, in Zomba.

18. For more about Chisiza, see Rotberg, Overcoming the Oppressors, forthcoming.

19. Interview with Bwanausi, 3 July 1962, in Zomba.

20. The story of the disintegration of Malawi's first government is contained in the postscript to Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa, 317–21.

21. The full story is too detailed for this article, but it can be found in Rotberg, Overcoming the Oppressors, forthcoming.

22. Interview with Kawawa, 23 August 1961, in his office in Dar es Salaam. For more on Kawawa, see Raymond F. Hopkins, Political Roles in a New State: Tanzania's First Decade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971, 22, 27, 29); Cranford Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania 1945–1968: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 121–6).

23. When he and I talked in January 1960 on the verandah of the old New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam, he anticipated independence for Tanganyika only ‘sometime within the decade’. He was in charge a little more than a year later.

24. Interview with Kambona, 26 August 1961, in his office in Dar es Salaam. For more on Kambona and his relations with Nyerere, see George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 72–7, 93–7, 242–5). See also Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania 1945–1968, 104–5, 145, 187, 203.

25. Interview with Paul Bomani, Aug 25, 1961, in Dar es Salaam. See also Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam, 71, 264; G. Andrew Maguire, Toward ‘Uhuru’ in Tanzania: the Politics of Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 84–99, 183–6).

26. On the cooperatives movement, see Joel Samoff, Tanzania: Local Politics and the Structure of Power (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974, 179–207).

27. Interview with Kawawa, 23 August 1961, in Dar es Salaam. Pratt, Critical Phase, 51–2.

28. Interview with Swai, 14 August 1961, in Dar es Salaam. See also Roberts, State-Making, 71.

29. Interview with Obote, 8 September 1961, in his office in Kampala; See also Donald Anthony Low, Buganda in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, 236–9).

30. Interview with Mayanja, 29 December 1962, in Kampala.

31. See Ingham, Kenneth, The Making of Modern Uganda (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958, 245–50)Google Scholar. Ingham taught Mayanja; Low, Buganda in Modern History, 149–51; Apter, David E., The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study of Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, 256–61)Google Scholar.

32. Interview with Obangwor, 22 December 1962, in Kampala.

33. Interview with Magezi, 20 December 1962, in Entebbe. See also Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda, 408–9.

34. Interview with Bataringaya, 21 December 1962, in Kampala.

35. Seretse Khama, later president of Botswana, echoed Thomas Paine, consciously. Quoted in Tlou, Thomas, Parsons, Neil, and Henderson, Willie, Seretse Khama, 1921–1980 (Gaborone: Botswana Society, 1950, 61)Google Scholar.