The second half of the twentieth century in Africa saw a range of struggles for emancipation from colonialist and capitalist oppression. This course examines the theory and practice of six major African revolutionaries: Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara. We will think about what constitutes a revolution and consider several related events, practices, and concepts, such as decolonization, national liberation, anticolonial war, and class struggle. We will also explore the role of culture and history in revolutionary projects of social transformation, including the issues of territorial organization, mass participation, democratic representation, religious and customary moral principles, and the function of intellectuals. Finally, we will engage throughout the course with the ways in which African militants adopted, adapted, and “stretched” the ideas they inherited from Marxist–Leninist theory and the global socialist tradition.
In line with the freedom movements represented by the revolutionaries on this syllabus, the course takes Africa as a conceptual and methodological whole, rejecting divisions based on language (Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabophone) as much as cultural geography (North vs. Sub-Saharan). Posing the question of “Africa” means exploring the relationships between different scales (village and city, nation, region, continent); the connections between class, race, and gender; and the different kinds of received and imagined collectivities. How did our protagonists associate freedom with unity? How did they formulate their claims for “independence”? And how did they connect their critiques of colonialist and capitalist exploitation with “development”?
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