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.

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.

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

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