Africa's Agitators: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (review)

I am a journalist, and I have noted that discussions about Africa's antico-lonial struggles—at least among people outside of academia—most often focus on the immediate post–World War II period. Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Nnamdi Azikiwe are among the great names that are commonly referenced, for example, usually in terms of the 1950s and 1960s; the emblematic issues and events that come to mind are Kenya's "Mau Mau" (or the Land and Freedom Movement), Touré's refusal to acquiesce to the French government's referendum on a new "French community," decolonization in the Congo and Patrice Lumumba's assassination, and the Algerian revolution. One of the great merits of Jonathan Derrick's Africa's Agitators is that it reminds us that neither the people nor the political movements we tend to identify with African independence came out of nowhere, and that these political histories go back much further.

Subtitled Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West 1918–1939, this book's detailed and rigorously researched portrayal of struggle in Africa between the two World Wars fills a huge gap in our understanding of African-led anticolonial campaigns. And it does so in remarkably few pages (only 483): it could have been encyclopedic in size. Although sometimes weighed down by its detail (particularly by the welter of acronyms), the work is generally an engagingly well-written narrative that easily could interest a general audience—an impressive achievement, for it could easily have been a turgid piece of scholarship.

Derrick makes clear early on that his work is narrowly focused and that he is not writing about the meaning of African nationalism but specifically about African opposition to the fact of European rule—"the opposition which alien invasion, occupation and exploitation have always aroused among subjected people" (66). Thus the book establishes unequivocally that from the beginning of European colonialism, Africa resisted—a point that cannot be emphasized enough. Furthermore, this resistance was led by Africans—another point that cannot be emphasized enough: the Zulus defeated the British in 1879; Ethiopia defeated Italy in 1896. But the wealth to be found in Africa kept European powers coming, and eventually superior weaponry resulted in the conquest of the continent. Nonetheless, African resistance continued on a smaller scale, and Derrick examines how three critical factors helped shape that resistance: African soldiers returning from the First World War, who formed a core group of dissatisfied activists; the impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution and general socialist agitation in Europe; and pan-African ideas, which led blacks of the diaspora to adopt the goals of Africa's anticolonial agitators.

Derrick's work is handicapped by the limited availability of African sources; consequently there is a dependence on European sources, particularly when it comes to examining organizations in Africa. Nonetheless, especially in the contexts of North Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, we are introduced to the people and organizations that laid the foundations for African independence, many of them long-erased from the historical narratives of Africa's struggles against colonialism.

The book is strongest in its portrayal of the interaction of Africa's agitators with others on the international stage, particularly with regard to the Russian Revolution and the pan-African movement. The Communists, writes Derrick "were almost alone in accepting the idea of colonial independence" (136). But Derrick also guides us through what might be called the Stalinist betrayal, when the Russian leader ordered Communist parties not to make common cause with nationalist organizations like those agitating in Africa. We get a very clear picture of how African agitators took advantage of sympathies in Europe, as well as Europe's tolerance for anticolonial protest in its metropoles. On the continent African political activities were greatly restricted; in Europe, ironically, Africans "were free to meet, write and organize...