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:

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:

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:

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:

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.