This concluding chapter begins with comparisons between Liberia and Ghana made on the occasion of Ghana’s independence in 1957. It then uses Liberia’s economic history to reassess conclusions about the impact of formal and informal colonialism on economic development, and draws out lessons from Liberia’s history for our understanding of postindependence developments in the rest of Africa.

Chapter 2 examines how far ideas of human rights were taken up by activists and protest organisations during their campaigns over the end of the British empire in Africa and the creation of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The chapter begins by assessing the impact of African questions on Britain, emphasising the significance of moral – as opposed to political - concerns. The two main sections of the chapter are, first, a detailed discussion of the handful of individuals (in particular Eileen Fletcher) who criticised Britain’s brutal handling of the ‘Mau Mau‘ rebellion in Kenya and, secondly, an analysis of the first phase of the anti-apartheid movement, a campaign which more fully embraced human rights. The chapter concludes by looking at how the emergence of independent African states in the 1950s created new human rights concerns for activists, in particular over the oppression of ethnic minorities.

This chapter retraces the radical ‘imaginative geography’ of Pan-Africanism (and its demise) through the literature of Abrahams and Sembene. Beyond exploring the imaginative geography of the texts it also calls attention to the imaginative or discursive nature of geography itself. It is argued that the ‘imaginative geography’ of the Cold War served to circulate and sediment a particular way of ‘writing global space’ (a ‘geopolitics’), which in turn legitimised the ‘world of states’, and de-legitimised its alternatives. The Cold War and international law, it is argued, conspired to defeat Pan-Africanism’s radical project to rewrite the global.