The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945–1966

At a recent meeting of the Abuja Literary Society, I listened to attendees discuss the economic, political, and social developments they continued to hope for over sixty years after Nigerian independence. Then they moved on to debate whether or not Nigerians were even “ready” for the advanced level of development that many of them associate with nations in the Global North. This debate about the psychology of development in the Global South is not new, and for over a decade Frank Gerits has been working to detail how Africans shaped this debate after 1945. The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945–1966 is the culmination of that work, speaking to scholars in diplomatic history and international relations from what Gerits describes as the perspective of the Global South.This perspective depends on extensive archival research, including ten African archives in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia. However, several of these archives add little to the book. Just two documents from Ethiopia appear in the citations, both from the African Union Archives. And only five documents from Nigeria are footnoted, one of which details the purchase of a dehumidifier for the National Archives in Ibadan that Gerits complains is no longer in use (14, 200fn77). Senegal does a little better with fifteen citations. Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia are all well-represented. Lamenting that contemporary historians favor “stories of the everyday” over “grand narratives of the Global South,” Gerits depends on these archives to craft a “big book” with an “Africa-centered” and “multiperspective approach” (x, 14–15).The overarching argument Gerits advances is that “the liberationist mission to rework colonial modernity, not the anticolonial engagement with the Cold War, shaped the postcolonial global order.” In other words, African decolonization was not simply reactionary to the bipolar logics of the Cold War but was an interventionist ideology opposed to imperialism, capitalism, and communism, shifting discussions from an East–West to North–South axis. Furthermore, Gerits argues that the “ideological deliberations between anticolonial leaders also created a liberationist international system, since Third World nationalists built different types of federative and cooperate structures beyond their own postcolonial state to marshal the economic, cultural, and political capacity required to attain modernity on the Global South's terms” (2–3). The role of psychology in diagnosing the ills of colonial modernity and prescribing African-centered remedies to cultivate development is a major thread that hold these two arguments together. The archival material Gerits draws on reveals in striking detail that ultimately “all powers had to take a stance regarding liberation” (183).Gerits organizes his work into eight case studies. Chapter 1 details the psychological explanations underpinning the “scramble for African hearts and minds” that circulated among Africans and non-Africans alike beginning in 1945. In Chapter 2, Gerits uses the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung to chart the subsequent emergence of the “anticolonial modernization project.” Chapter 3 examines the evolution of Pan-Africanism in Ghana and Nkrumah's plan for a “Monroe Doctrine for Africa.” Throughout the rest of the book, Ghana occupies a central role in Gerits's argument about African agency in the international system. Chapter 4 details diplomatic debates around French atomic testing in the Sahara, revealing the emergent fault lines between and among independent African states with little regard for the Cold War framings preferred by many scholars. Chapter 5, set in the context of the Congo Crisis, further highlights the evolution of the “Pan-Africanist anticolonial worldview” that crystalized in the Casablanca Group and the consolidating opposition to Nkrumah's plans for the continent in the Monrovia Group. These fault lines widen into fractures in chapter 6, which begins with the Belgrade Conference and then moves on to the subsequent struggle between vocal anticolonialism and socioeconomic modernization schemes that began to reject non-alignment. In chapter 7, Gerits shifts his attention to the southern African struggle against the settler states of Rhodesia and South Africa. Focused as it is on the “calibrated psychological approach” of African nationalists’ opposition to the crisis of “racial modernity,” this chapter demands a careful reading and is one of the most book's most important interventions. In chapter 8, Gerits details the tensions embodied in the founding of the OAU in 1963, observing that by 1966 “a new generation of African leaders also began to look for new solutions to the development problem, preferring Communist or capitalist modernization programs over the liberationist path to modernity.” He continues, “the resources the superpowers could marshal made them more appealing options in the ideological scramble for Africa” (180). Nevertheless, Gerits concludes that “the end of the Third World project was not primarily the outcome of Cold War pressures but the result of a contradiction within liberationist ideologies” (184). This tension between superpower and African agency remains unresolved in the book.Gerits's book does have some loose ends. For example, in his introduction, Gerits places the liberationist mission within the “long shadow of the Haitian Revolution” without establishing that the political actors he examines situated their struggle explicitly in this tradition (7). In Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James does say that “Nkrumah and other revolutionaries read and absorbed The Black Jacobins,” but Gerits does not cite this or other sources to firmly establish his claim.1 Another loose end that caught my attention is when Gerits criticizes Jeffrey Byrne for claiming, “FLN leaders remained ‘less the product of ideologies, than of methodologies’” (13). Gerits is concerned that Africans are being denied credit for transforming the international system, but what Byrne actually says is “the Third World and perhaps the twentieth-century world as a whole were less the product of ideologies than of methodologies.” And of the FLN in particular, Byrne says, “their liberation struggle was, therefore, not so much a war to expel a foreign invader as it was akin to a nation and state- building process that would render the French presence anachronistic and unsustainable.”2 So did the FLN lack an interventionist ideology of its own? Gerits never advances an argument or provides evidence about FLN foreign policy elsewhere on the continent. In general, except for scattered references to Nasserism, Africa north of the Sahara feels ignored in this book. But at the All African People's Conference held in Accra in 1958—detailed in chapter 3—serious discussions emerged around the question of who was or was not “an African.” One Nigerian delegate, Anthony Enahoro, is reputed to have said, “I'm having a terribly difficult time getting used to the idea of Egyptians being Africans all of a sudden.”3 The question of who or what is African is certainly connected to debates about the psychology of development.In spite of loose ends, The Ideological Scramble for Africa is a must-read for anyone interested in African history. Gerits will no doubt continue to produce important work and has already began publishing work on the period after 1966, which, I imagine, will eventually fill out the pages of his next “big book.”