African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence by Phyllis Taoua (review)

Phyllis Taoua’s African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence questions perceptions of freedom and independence by individuals and African nations after independence. The author discusses the stark contrast of being independent and not enjoying freedom based on human experience: “My book is an attempt to capture what is most essential in an evolving conversation about the ongoing struggle to achieve meaningful freedom in Africa after national liberation” (15). This quest for a new definition of freedom, sixty years after most African nations gained independence, lies in the historical assumption by researchers and experts in the field that political and economic independence existed in name only. Taoua does not make her claim lightly: she draws on the Pan-African movement, championed by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and well-known African historical figures of the anticolonialist struggle, such as Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, to make her case for how Africans are and should keep fighting to bring about meaningful freedom.

As a seasoned scholar who has traveled all over Africa, shaping her research through the lenses of what she calls the “Formule Ricard” (14), Taoua goes to great lengths to illustrate, in a manner reminiscent of the imprisonment or exile that authors such as Wole Soyinka of Nigeria and Mongo Beti of Cameroun have endured, how the illusory freedom of Africa affects individuals as well as nations. The density of the book resides in its geographical scope, which spans from North to western and southern Africa with a focus on a vast array of works by contemporary African writers and filmmakers in global Africa, where “multinationals make billions in profit, while the people who live on the land are trapped in endemic poverty and often traumatized by armed conflict” (217). Her analysis covers both Francophone and Anglophone Africa with an extensive exploration of the works and thought of authors in the canon of African letters, such as Sony Labou Tansi and Ayi Kwei Armah, that scrutinize the ways colonial heritage dashed the hope of African people for “meaningful freedom” under the authority of new African leaders who were bound to safeguard the interests of the former colonizer.

Women’s freedom, based on Taoua’s own experience as the wife of a Tuareg man, cannot be dissociated from the narrative of meaningful freedom. Existential issues that women face in African society, including the right to education, personal finances, and the choice of their own spouses, is a leitmotif of African feminism underpinned in the works of Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko and writers such as Mariama Bâ of Senegal and Assia Djebar of Algeria.

Taoua skillfully frames Africans’ ongoing sociopolitical and economic struggles in the era of democracy, as depicted in the works of contemporary African writers and filmmakers, under the concept of meaningful freedom. Democracy is not holding ground on the continent, since it was not imagined by Africans for themselves in relation to their own social, cultural, political, and economic realities. African democracy is a Western construction that must yet adapt to Africans’ way of life and their expectations. In that sense, Taoua’s quest is a wake-up call that echoes Achille Mbembe’s claim: “Decolonization without democracy is a very poor, fictitious form of repossession of self. But, if Africans want democracy, it’s up to them to imagine its forms and pay the price. No one will pay it for them. They won’t get it on credit either” (29). In her approach to ongoing African struggles, Taoua identifies three types of freedom that become, with the exception of the last chapter, the footprint to the conclusion of each chapter in her book: instrumental, substantive, and existential, the sum of which equals what she coins “meaningful freedom.”