Self-Determination in the Black Atlantic

In a study of "transborder exchanges" between Mahdist Sudan and the kingdoms and principalities in present-day Ethiopia, Iris Seri-Hersch shows how the very notion of a "border" was reshaped by both Turco-Egyptian and European imperial dynamics on the African continent in the late nineteenth century.¹ Under European pressure, the Turco-Egyptian administration in Cairo began to understand territoriality in Northeast Africa as both effective occupation and the land where Muslims lived, that is, as a place with a fixed cultural identity. On the other hand, the princes, sheiks, and chiefs living in what is now Sudan and Ethiopia were more concerned with "effective control": the capacity to organize raids and collect taxes. Any notion of a border would have been understood as "an undefined zone extending into their neighbors lands."² However, by around 1876 we find one Ethiopian leader, Yohannes IV, appropriating the idea of a territorially bounded zone in order to limit Turco-Egyptian expansion in the Horn of Africa. We find Yohannes speaking with De Sarzec, the French consul at Massawa in Eritrea, exhorting European Christian sovereigns to demarcate the borders between Ismail-Pasha and Yohannes IV (Egypt and Ethiopia). He says: "They [the Christian sovereigns of Europe] will delimit our respective borders. What they do will be well done, and I commit myself not to transgress the limits that they draw for me."³ In this statement we already see some notion of a proto-nationalist state being marked out and differentiated from other regions within North East Africa. A framework is being established that brings together disparate groups in North East Africa under the ambit of a clearly designated sovereign whose jurisdiction would not overlap with other sovereigns. Here, too, we see the international context of European imperialism reshaping social relations internal to the burgeoning nation-states in North East Africa.

Over the past decade the study of formal decolonization in the African and Black Atlantic world has been preoccupied with a debate over whether the nation-state was inevitably the political form through which twentieth-century anticolonial political arrangements had to be articulated. Most prominently Fred Cooper and Gary Wilder have argued that imperial citizenship in the French empire could have been decolonized and reorganized through a federalist arrangement between metropolitan France and its overseas territories.⁴ The French empire integrated colonialized peoples into a worldmaking system that was organized through unequal racial and economic hierarchies. Cooper and Wilder argue that federation could have reformed the center so that the democratic obligations of white Europeans would become inextricably tied to the colonies. In contrast, the decolonized nation-state system provided an arrangement in which European states not only surrendered colonies but also abandoned overseas populations.⁵ In this rendering of the postcolonial state, both metropolitan France and its colonies are seen as mired in a narrow nationalist particularism; federation is thus posited as the fuller universal that colonized peoples once aspired to but failed to reach.

Adorn Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination enters into the folds of this debate, only to argue that the Westphalian system and its concomitant nation-state form have no fixed meaning. By the mid-twentieth century, Getachew argues, the nation-state had been appropriated by Black anticolonial thinkers and writers on either side of the Atlantic as a way to reform international hierarchy. The thinkers Getachew is primarily concerned with are Eric Williams, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nnamdi Azikwe, and Michael Manley; she argues that collectively their words and deeds were responsible for substantially rewriting the meaning of the nation-state. In Getachew's telling, these Black Atlantic thinkers developed a unique perspective on empire as rooted in enslavement. Here enslavement is not a metaphor but designates a political economy that links all sides of Africa to Europe and the Americas. Anticolonial nationalism was then understood as a system that could challenge this enslavement while...