Description
Book SynopsisIn The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah''s African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana''s support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nation
Table of Contents
Introduction:: How African Liberation Shaped the International System
1. A Foreign Policy of the Mind, 1945–1954
2. Offering Hungry Minds a Better Development Project, 1955–1956
3. The Pan-African Path to Modernity, 1957–1958
4. Redefining Decolonization in the Sahara, 1959–1960
5. The Congo Crisis as the Litmus Test for Psychological Modernization, 1960–1961
6. Managing the Effects of Modernization, 1961–1963
7. The Struggle to Defeat Racial Modernity in South Africa and Rhodesia, 1963–1966
8. The Collapse of Anticolonial Modernization, 1963–1966
Conclusion:: How Decolonization Made Our Times
