Independent Africa

In 1957, Ghana achieved its independence, a moment that has come to represent the unleashing of the era of African decolonization. By the middle of the following decade, the majority of the continent would attain independence and mark a generation of political leaders with the task of defining the meanings, structures, and values of African self-governance. It is the hopes and challenges of this task that serve as the heart of Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong's phenomenal Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders. In this rich book, Akyeampong turns to the concept of “worldmaking” most recently popularized by political scientist Adom Getachew (2019) to tackle the question of what African leaders sought out of decolonization or, in particular, what a decolonized world that took African interests seriously would look like. In contrast to Getachew, though, who approached African and diasporic worldmaking through the lens of political theory, Akyeampong turns to political economy. Such a perspective allows him to more fully historicize the actions and ambitions of this first generation of postcolonial leaders by focusing on the political and economic policy choices they made within the broader context of mid-century Cold War and decolonization-era politics.At its broadest level, Independent Africa offers a tailored continent-level perspective of mid-twentieth-century African politics. However, Akyeampong does concentrate his analysis on four core individuals and contexts, namely Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana, Sékou Touré and Guinea, Leopold Senghor and Senegal, and Julius Nyerere and Tanzania. Even among these cases, Nkrumah and Ghana stand out for Akyeampong as “the spine of the book” (8). Moreover, in his analysis, Akyeampong outlines three major arguments for the book, each of which in different ways have become central areas of study among Africanist scholars in the decades since independence. The first of which Akyeampong details is that of what “nation” means in a political and demographic context marked by religious and ethnic diversity (4). As Akyeampong highlights, key among the concerns of the era's political leaders was the real and perceived threats posed by politicized religious and ethnic identities, leading to attacks on such identities and the political movements deriving from them as outdated, “tribalist,” and antithetical to the goal of national unity. In the case of Nkrumah, which Akyeampong features in the book's second chapter, the result was a complicated relationship with both the church and the institution of chieftaincy as he and his government pushed against the independence of both while co-opting aspects of their meanings and performance to advance his and the government's political interests. In that same chapter, Akyeampong outlines similar processes in Guinea with Sékou Touré’s attacks on fetishism in Guinea's Forest Region during the Demystification Campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s as well as in the “accommodationist” relationship between Leopold Senghor and Senegal's marabouts.Building off the era's political leaders’ focus on creating an atmosphere of national unity was their emphasis on guiding their respective countries toward economic development, a theme that drives Independent Africa's second major focus. Here, Akyeampong powerfully connects the dots between the popular legitimacy of political independence with the continuing economic growth and wellbeing of the newly independent states’ citizenries. A discussion of development economics thus takes center stage here, with Akyeampong offering reflections on Nkrumah's relationships with renowned economists such as W. Arthur Lewis and the famous wager between him and Côte d'Ivoire's Félix Houphouët-Boigny as well as Peter Tomas Bauer's critique of development economics. Moreover, Akyeampong adds to this discussion with an analysis of the industrialization ambitions of Nkrumah's government, a reflection on the politics and economics of ujamaa in Tanzania, and discussions of the unequal international power structures shaping both Senegalese and Guinean development efforts. In Senegal in particular, Akyeampong highlights a political repertoire that sought to maintain, if not strengthen, the new country's political and economic relationship with France after independence, a goal that fundamentally distinguished it from the other major case studies Akyeampong examined (192–96). And finally, Akyeampong's third major argument, which closely connects to the internationalist and transnational theoretical perspective offered by Getachew, is an emphasis on the interconnectedness of the local, national, and international levels in shaping mid-century African understandings of postcolonial sovereignty as key to their respective countries’ and continent's economic development (5). Here, the tensions and possibilities of Pan-Africanism, nonalignment, federation, and confederation play out in his survey of such events and institutions as the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress, the 1958 All-African People's Congress, and the New International Economic Order, among others.In all, Independent Africa is a powerful, important, and highly engaging book. As the popularity of the decolonization era has risen among historians in recent decades, scholars and students alike have needed a work that analytically synthesizes the rapidly growing scholarship on the era, especially in terms of its political and economic history. Independent Africa accomplishes this task more so than any other book to date. For some, the heavy focus on Ghana at the expense of even some of Akyeampong's other chosen case studies may be a bit off-putting. However, via the examples Akyeampong chose and the pure force of Nkrumah on the continental and international stage at the time, it is hard to argue against what appears in various stated and implied ways throughout the book that many of the continent's leaders were directly and indirectly responding to the examples (good and bad) set by Nkrumah as they outlined their own postcolonial political and economic agendas. As such, Independent Africa is not just a must read for scholars of African decolonization, it is also a book that given its accessibility should find its way onto many a syllabus

Political science · African history and culture studies