Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa

Chapter Ten Africa in the Global Decolonization Process: The Road to Postcoloniality

161 C h a pt e r T e n Africa in the Global Decolonization Process The Road to Postcoloniality r a l p h a . au s t e n T h e s u b j e ct of decolonization has taken a roller coaster ride through the relatively short lifetime of Africanist historiography.This entire field first came into its own near the end of the colonial era, and much of its energy drew upon the promise of impending independence. Decolonization was seen at that time largely from the perspective of African political movements and their preparation for the impending task— so ominous during the present Iraq and Afghanistan situations—of nation building. In the ensuing decades, tellingly labeled postcolonial rather than national, disillusionment with the performance of new African states made the moment of their birth appear less significant. In a 1987 book I could thus assert, “It is even possible to write an economic history of Africa without designating the shift to independence as a major turning point.”1 In preparing the present chapter in 2004, I was surprised to see what a vast amount of scholarship had been dedicated specifically to decolonization over the past two decades, including two “decolonization readers”published over the previous year.2 To be sure,most of this literature gives at least as much attention to Asia as to Africa. Much of it can also be explained less by an analytic interest in the topic than by the new availability of European and American archives for the 1950s and 1960s. These records have, however, added more nuance than major revisionist revelations to existing narratives. Moreover, the topic of African nationalism remains pretty much off the radar screen.3 162 ralph a. austen The shift to a more metropole-centered account ofAfrican decolonization does represent a major change in perspective and sometimes explicit interpretation.For Africanists,moreover,the central questions to be answered have taken a radical turn. Instead of asking, how did Africans overcome and incorporate the experiences of colonialism in order to regain their independence? the new goal, as stated by Frederick Cooper, is “understanding how Africa ended up with the kind of independence which it,for the most part,got.”4 The clear implication here is that this has not been a very happy independence.“The past of the present”—to cite the subtitle of a more recent work by the same author5 —is linked very particularly to the terminal phase of colonialism , which must therefore be reexamined. Likewise we need to extend the story beyond the 1960s to understand the degree to which decolonization was ever fully achieved. Frederick Cooper holds a deserved position as one of the preeminent historians of modern Africa, so I will use him as a point of departure for suggesting the kind of framework I think we need to comprehend the role of colonialism and decolonization in shaping contemporary Africa.There can be no quarrel with Cooper’s assertion of considerable continuity between the colonial development efforts of the post–World War II era and the state projects of the early independence era. He also shows how the failure and high cost of these projects induced Europeans to abandon them, leaving African governments to work out the problems for themselves. The present argument will depart from Cooper by placing the transformations of Africa in a more global process. Cooper himself has very effectively shown some of the limitations of the concept of globalization for understanding African history. This critique is consciously linked to his analysis of the “modernization theory” that inspired colonial development managers in the 1940s and 1950s.6 In both cases the “particularities and complexities” of African society and its dynamics are reduced to abstracted versions of (or deviations from) what is supposed to be going on elsewhere.When such concepts are turned into policy, whether in the form of late-colonial development schemes or structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), they often impose great damage on African capacities for effective transformation. The problem with such an analysis is not that Cooper is wrong in his attacks on modernization and globalization theory but rather that 163 Africa in the Global Decolonization Process he makes such a critique the center of his historical analysis. It is the general instinct of Africanists, when faced with “lay” accounts of African problems,to take on the faulty,ethnocentric...