In the early twenty-first century, nations across Africa celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. The symbols employed to mark the occasion and the memories evoked bore witness to the joys as well as the trials and tribulations of a fifty-year history. For many, fifty years of independent nationhood was an occasion for celebration.1 But at the same time, the history of nationalism and nationhood is not purely a celebratory story. The politics of the early twenty-first century, in African countries as elsewhere in the world, served as a reminder that modern nationalism also has a dark side, and that violence and dispossession can follow when dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are drawn along national lines.

Chapter 6 further documents and analyzes slaves’ criticism of early republican principles and antislavery policies. Antioquia slave leaders emerged as vanguard abolitionists in 1812, folding critical antislavery conventions from the judicial forum into emerging anti-Spanish, egalitarian, and republican doctrines. They proposed that the liberation of slaves should be an immediate purpose of the new republic, and suggested that slaves fully belonged in their homeland of Antioquia – a critique of limited republican citizenship. But republican leaders paid no attention to this exegesis of liberty, claiming that the slaves’ immediate liberation would bring about chaos. This tension would be inherited by the Republic of Colombia’s manumission law of 1821, which closed the possibility of immediate abolition. Still, powerful Popayán masters, denounced by the former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen as “aristocrats,” continued to defend inequality and bondage. They undermined even limited antislavery legislation on the groundless notion that setting slaves free from their masters would unleash a war of black against white and paralyze gold mining.