Conceptions and characterizations of colonialism vary considerably among scholars
of Africa. Differences and debates center on four sets of interrelated issues:
first, the place and importance of the colonial period in African history; second, the nature of the colonial encounter and
its
Imperialist approaches, which prevailed in the
early twentieth century, emphasized the civilizing mission and impact of
colonialism. Critiques against this tradition, combined with nationalist
struggles that led to decolonization, culminated in the rise of nationalist
historiography, which emphasized African activities and agency. From the 1970s,
influenced by a growing sense of pessimism about the developmental and
democratic capacities of the postcolonial state and the rise of militant
ideologies and social movements, "radical" approaches emerged,
centered on dependency and Marxist ideas that highlighted the economic
depredations and effects of colonialism. In the 1990s, following the demise of
socialist regimes and ideologies and the spread of poststructuralism and
postmodernism, postcolonial perspectives were increasingly used to reinterpret
the cultural and discursive dynamics and complexities of colonialism.
Additional paradigms on colonialism arose, most critically those informed by
feminist and environmental studies, which stress the role of gender and ecology
in the construction of colonial identities, societies, and political economies.
Colonialism in African History
Imperialist and nationalist historiographies
represent almost diametrically opposed views of the place and impact of
colonialism in African history, with one regarding it as a decisive moment, the
other, as a parenthesis. To the imperialists, colonialism in fact brought
Africa into history, for in their view, Africa "proper," to use
Hegel's moniker—from which North Africa was excised—was the land of the
"Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit," exhibiting "the natural man
in his completely wild and untamed state" (pp. 91, 93). European
colonialism, therefore, was depicted as a civilizing mission undertaken to
historicize and humanize Africans.
Consequently, imperialist historians mostly
discussed in positive light the policies of colonial governments and the
activities of colonial auxiliaries, from European merchants to missionaries.
When their narratives mentioned Africans, it was to condemn their societies and
cultures or to chronicle their Westernization or modernization. Those who
resisted colonial conquest or colonial rule were depicted as atavistic, while
those who collaborated or accepted the colonial regime were praised for their
foresight and wisdom. In fact, in-depth study of African societies was largely
left to anthropology, which, with its functionalist-positivist paradigms and
ethnographic present, exonerated, if not extolled, colonialism.
Nationalist historians offered an ideological and
methodological revolt against imperialist historiography. Using new sources,
including oral tradition, historical linguistics, and historical anthropology,
together with written and archaeological sources, they chronicled the histories
of African states and societies before the European colonial conquest and
celebrated the growth and eventual triumph of nationalism during the colonial era. They
sought to unravel painstakingly African activity, adaptations, choice, and
initiative. Led by J. F. Ade Ajayi (1968) in Anglophone Africa and Cheikh Anta
Diop (1974) in Francophone Africa, they emphasized continuity in Africa's long
history and reduced colonialism to a parenthesis, an episode, a digression, a
footnote that had altered African cultures and societies only slightly. In this
narrative, independence marked a moment of historical recovery in which the
agency of the precolonial past was restored and reconnected to the postcolonial
future. The linear and celebratory tales of nationalist historiography were
later found wanting by numerous critics.
While both the dependency and the Marxist scholars
focused on the exploitative economic structures and processes of colonialism,
the former were more interested in explaining the external forces that produced
and reproduced Africa's underdevelopment; the latter preferred to concentrate
on the internal dynamics. To the dependentistas, colonialism marked a second
stage in Africa's incorporation into an unequal world capitalist system that
was ushered in during the fifteenth century with the onset of the Atlantic slave
trade. Marxist
scholars sought to transcend the ubiquitous and homogeneous capitalism of
dependency theory. Colonialism, they argued, entails the articulation of modes
of production whereby pre-capitalist modes are articulated in their diverse
relations with the capitalist mode. Hence the introduction of capitalism by
colonialism does not eliminate the precapitalist modes but re-shapes them; the
latter are progressively subordinated to capital through a contradictory
process of destruction, preservation, and transformation.
Unlike the nationalists, the imperialist,
dependency, and Marxist historians share the view that the colonial period was
decisive in African history. But they differ in their characterization and
conceptualization of the place and impact of colonialism. Like the nationalists
and unlike the imperialists, the dependentistas and Marxists see colonialism as
an intrusive moment in the longue durée of African history. Insofar as
dependency analyses concentrate on the external determinations of
underdevelopment, they diminish African agency and echo imperialist accounts of
African history, whereas the Marxist focus on internal production processes and
social relations resonates with nationalist historiography.
The nationalist periodization of African history,
in which the colonial moment occupies limited space, was sanctified in the
Cambridge (History of Africa, 1977–1985) and UNESCO (General History of Africa,
1981–1993) histories, each in eight thick volumes, only two of which were on
the colonial and postcolonial periods. Yet far more African historians
currently work on the colonial period than on the precolonial period.
The Nature of the Colonial
Encounter
Colonialism in Africa entailed an encounter between
the continent and Europe. This encounter encompassed multiple spheres (from politics,
economy, and culture to sexuality, psychology, and representations), spatial
scales (from local and individual colonial territories to subregions and the
continent as a whole), and social groups and inscriptions (from the colonizers
and colonized to class, gender, and generation). Analyzing the nature of the
colonial encounter, therefore, has proved exceedingly complex and contentious,
given the range of possible analytical categories and conceptions of what
indeed "Europe" and "Africa" mean. Different readings
informed by disparate disciplinary or theoretical orientations emphasize the
political, economic, cultural, or representational import of the colonial
encounter.
Overall, some regard this encounter as essentially
antagonistic while others depict it as ambivalent or even accommodative. Until
recently, especially before the rise of postcolonial theory, colonialism was
largely conceived in antagonistic terms as a series of encounters between the
seemingly enduring and impermeable binaries of colonizer and colonized, Western
and non-Western, domination and resistance, modernity and tradition,
destruction and preservation, and universal and local. Postcolonialists insist
on the ambivalent nature of colonialism, its contingency and decenteredness, and
the hybridities and pluralities of the identities it produced. If colonialism
is primarily viewed as a political encounter among imperialist and nationalist
scholars and as an economic one among the radicals, the postcolonialists
emphasize its cultural and discursive dimensions.
The Bifurcated Colonial State
Studies on colonialism as politics and the politics
of colonialism have tended to focus on two main issues: the nature of the
colonial state and African resistance. Discussion and debate on the colonial
state have centered on its specificities and construction, how to classify
African colonial states and administrations, the dynamics of colonial power and
civil society, and the demise or reconstitution of the colonial state into the
postcolonial state. Crawford Young has argued quite forcefully that the African
colonial state derives its peculiarity from the fact that it enjoyed only some
of the crucial attributes of the modern state (territory, population, sovereignty, power, law, and the state as
nation, an international actor, and an idea) and could not exercise some of its
imperatives (hegemony, autonomy, security, legitimacy, revenue, and
accumulation).
This is because the colonial state in Africa was
created in the late nineteenth century, long after both the modern metropolitan
state and the generic colonial state had been formed, which allowed for no
experimentation. Also, as a conquest state imposed by force, its hegemony was
excessively coercive, so that it enjoyed little legitimacy. Moreover, its
territoriality was ambiguous, its sovereignty and institutions of rule were
extraverted and resided in the imperial metropole, and its revenue base was
weak. Charged with the onerous tasks of consolidating colonial rule, linking
the colony to the metropole, and establishing or promoting colonial capitalism,
the result was that the colonial state was both interventionist and fragile,
authoritarian and weak, and exercised domination without hegemony, all of which
ensured its eventual downfall.
All colonial states, irrespective of their
ideologies and administrative systems, justified themselves in the names of
civilization and pacification. Economic motivations of colonialism were
assiduously downplayed. Moreover, all colonial powers used African
intermediaries in their administrative systems because they lacked personnel and
local knowledge and in order to minimize African resistance and administrative
costs. They also used chartered companies in some of their colonies in the
early years.
In imperialist historiography, colonial power was
portrayed as unassailable because it was for Africa's good. For the opposite
reason it was decried in nationalist historiography, which stressed its
oppressiveness and incapacity to withstand the full might of nationalist
struggle. Dependency writers tended to disregard the importance of politics
because they believed that neither the colonial state nor African resistance
could stop the ineluctable juggernaut of the world capitalist system, while
Marxists subsumed colonial politics to either local class struggles (waged by
the numerically small working classes, and only reluctantly and later were
struggles by the much larger peasantries considered) or anti-imperialist
struggles mediated by communist parties in the imperial metropoles themselves or the
Soviet Union. Many of the early studies failed to examine the ways that
colonial power was specifically deployed, engaged, contested, deflected, or
appropriated.
It was not until Peter Ekeh published his
influential essay "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa" that
colonial civil society began to receive serious scholarly attention. He argued
that colonialism created two publics that he called the primordial and civic
publics, whose dialectical relationships accounted for the political problems
of postcolonial Africa. The first public is associated with primordial
groupings, sentiments, and activities; the second is associated with the
colonial administration and is amoral, lacking the generalized moral
imperatives operative in the private realm and in the primordial public. The
two publics emerged because colonial ideologies of legitimation denigrated African
societies and cultures and glorified European colonial rule, while African
bourgeois ideologies of legitimation accepted colonial ideas and principles to
justify the leadership of the elites in the fight against colonialism and the
inheritance of the postcolonial state. Both ideologies envisaged and sought to
separate the indigenous and colonial publics, in which different conceptions of
citizenship, morality, and material expectations prevailed. Thus colonial civil
society was characterized by the bifurcation of the public realm, which
accounts for the centrality of ethnicity in African politics and the
disjunction between the state and society that has bedeviled postcolonial
Africa.
Others saw the bifurcation and ethnicization of
colonial civil society differently. In his award-winning book Citizen and
Subject, Mahmood Mamdani argued that the bifurcation of power in Africa results
from the continent's distinctive colonial experience. The configuration of
colonial rule in Africa led first to the institutionalization of two systems of
power under a single authority: one urban, based on civil power and rights,
excluding the colonized on the basis of race, the other rural, where tradition
and culture incorporated the colonized into the rule of custom. Second,
colonial rule in Africa led to the privileging of state-ordained and
state-enforced traditions that had least historical depth and were monarchical,
authoritarian, and patriarchal, so that customary power and law became an integral
part of a decentralized despotism. Finally, with custom becoming the language
of force, colonial rule led to rationalizing the appropriation and management
of land and the mobilization of labor under the colonial rubric.
This bifurcated state power, civil and customary,
first crystallized in equatorial Africa—as "indirect rule" in British
colonies and "association" in French colonies—and later spread to
older colonies to the north and south, including South Africa, where apartheid
represented the last attempt at reorganizing the state structure to incorporate
the "native" population in a world of enforced tradition. The
challenges confronting African countries in the struggles for independence and
after were to democratize the state and particularly customary power,
deracialize civil society, and restructure unequal external relations of
dependency.
Dependent Colonial Capitalism
To many scholars, economics, not politics, is
central to the colonial project. In the 1970s systematic studies began to
appear on African colonial economies. Three dominant approaches emerged. The
first was rooted in neoclassical economic theory and focused largely on market
processes and the problems of resource allocation. Anthony Hopkins has provided
the most famous neoclassical treatment of African economic history. Using
vent-for-plus theory (that colonialism provided a "vent," or an
"opening"), he argues that colonialism inaugurated an "open
economy" of increased market opportunities, which West Africans seized
with alacrity by mobilizing previously underutilized resources. Hopkins's
economic history walked a fine line between the imperialist approaches that
stressed the modernizing impact of colonialism and the nationalist emphasis on
African initiatives.
The second approach was dependency, which was born
out of dissatisfaction with prevailing neoclassical descriptions, analyses, and
prescriptions for Third World development. Using the concepts of
"incorporation," "unequal exchange," "development of
underdevelopment," and "center-periphery," dependency writers
emphasized external economic linkages and exchange relations, often at the
expense of internal and production processes. Walter Rodney's influential text
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa portrayed colonialism simply as a new stage in
Africa's unrelenting slide into structural internal underdevelopment and
external dependency.
Marxist scholars attacked both neoclassical and
dependency writers for alleged theoretical inadequacies, empirical shortcomings,
and ideological biases. They sought to employ concepts of dialectical and
historical materialism—which seek to examine how specific systems originate,
develop, function, and change in given historical epochs—to unravel Africa's
historical realities. For the precolonial era, it proved difficult to fit
Africa into the traditional Marxian modes or to construct specific African
ones. As far as the colonial economy was concerned, many Marxists found the
concept of the articulation of modes of production useful and produced
interesting studies on labor and workers, agriculture and peasants, and the
changing structures of Africa's incorporation into the world economy.
Despite the different emphases of the three
approaches, it is possible to outline the common features shared by African
colonial economies: they were all expected to provide raw materials and markets
for the imperial economies and to be financially self-supporting. The colonial
economy was characteristically export-oriented and monocultural and suffered
from uneven productivity between sectors and outside domination in terms of
markets, technology, and capital. It developed in three phases: first, the
period up to World War I, when coercion—forced labor, cultivation, and taxation—predominated; second, the
interwar years, characterized by regulation of the colonial economy and the
disruptions of the Great Depression, which exposed its vulnerabilities and
fostered new economic policies of development planning; and third, the
post–World War II period, when "colonial development and welfare"
policies took hold, characterized by increased state intervention and
investment in "economic development."
Typologies of Colonialism
A key challenge in analyzing African colonial
economies, as with other spheres of colonialism, is their sheer diversity. The
temporal division between precolonial and colonial economies and polities and
their spatial development during the colonial period were manifested quite
unevenly. The growth and structure of colonial economies, for example, were
determined by the level of development of the precolonial economies themselves,
the nature of precolonial relations with Europe, the modes of conquest and
resistance, the level of development of the colonizing powers, the resource
endowment of each territory, and the presence or absence of European settlers.
Several attempts have been made to construct
typologies of African economies and colonialism more broadly. Three can be
identified. First is the renowned tripartite division of Africa developed by
Samir Amin (1972): the Africa of the labor reserves (Algeria, Kenya, and much of southern
Africa), where Africans were primarily expected to provide labor for European
colonial enterprises; the Africa of trade (West Africa, Uganda, Morocco, and
Tunisia), where Africa produced the bulk of commodities traded by colonial
companies; and the Africa of concession companies (central and equatorial
Africa and the Portuguese colonies), where chartered companies enjoyed economic
and administrative control over African labor and produce. Second is Thandika
Mkandawire's typology distinguishing between rentier and merchant economies, in
which surpluses are extracted from rents from mining and trade and taxes from
agriculture, respectively. Third is the distinction often drawn between settler
and peasant economies or modes of production.
The concept of peasants has a rich and
controversial literature in African studies. Debate has focused on the
historical origins of African peasantries, their relations with capital and the
state, internal differentiations, the changing organization of peasant
work—especially its complex articulations with gender and generational
relations and divisions—the impact of environmental conditions and changes, the
complex patterns of rural cultural construction, peasant knowledge systems, and
the intricacies of peasant politics and struggles at various levels, from the
household and the local community to the national and global system. In this
context, not only did colonialism alter the lives of African peasantries, but
the latter also profoundly shaped the terrain of colonialism in Africa.
The concept of the settler mode of production
sought to capture the specificities of settler colonies. Settler colonialism
was characterized by several features: the exclusion of competition (settler
control of key economic resources, including land, allocation of
infrastructure, banking, and marketing, at the expense of the indigenous
people); the predominance of the migrant labor system (which allowed the costs
of reproducing labor power to be borne in the rural reserves); generalized
repression whereby direct and brutal force was used regularly; and the close
intersection of race and class.
Linked to the concept of settler colonialism is the
concept of internal colonialism, in which the colonizing "nation" or
"race" occupies the same territory as the colonized people. This
concept found favor among some academics and liberation movements in South
Africa who saw the hierarchical, exploitative, and separatist structures of segregation and apartheid as analogous to
the relationship of domination and subjection between an imperialist state and
its racialized colonies. Harold Wolpe attacked the concept for positing an
unexplained autonomy of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups and obscuring the
relationships between them, akin to the theory of plural society widely used by
liberal scholars to describe South African society.
The Ambivalences of Colonial
Society
The pluralist approach was widely applied by social
anthropologies to explain many other African colonial societies, which were
depicted as "plural societies" in which different ethnic groups and
races lived in close proximity; colonial social
change was
attributed to "culture contact" and "acculturation." To the
pluralists, colonialism provided an arena for the acculturation of African
ethnic groups to European culture and values, and so they were preoccupied with
recording the patterns of what they called "detribalization" as
indicated by changes in clothes, occupations, education, family forms, and leisure
activities.
Marxist critics such as Bernard Magubane attacked
the indices used by the pluralists and the fact that the specifics of European
life and culture in Africa and their own "acculturation" or
"Africanization" were ignored. Above all, in their view, the
pluralists mystified the real social relations for they failed to place colonial
social change in the context of colonialism as a global system of economic
relations. The Marxists demonstrated that behind the processes of
"acculturation" lay widespread practices of resistance. For example,
the leisure activities of workers, as exhibited in work songs, often
articulated African popular resistance against colonial rule. Similarly, it was
demonstrated that transformations of cultural practices in the rural areas
reflected peasant attempts to resist and remake the colonial situation. The
Marxists maintained that religious conversions, whether to Christianity or Islam, represented not simply
"acculturation" and the renunciation of the old religions but also
translations of the old religions into new terms as filtered through the
complex mediations of class and social consciousness.
Preoccupied as they were to show African agency,
nationalist scholars were perhaps the loudest in refusing to see the processes
of colonial social and cultural change simply as a product of
"Westernization." In a famous essay on the invention of tradition in
colonial Africa, Terence Ranger insisted that social and cultural traditions
were invented and manipulated by both Europeans and Africans to serve their own
interests. Specifically, elders, men, ruling aristocracies, and indigenous
people appealed to "tradition." The elders did so in order to defend
their dominance over the rural means of production against challenges from the
youth; men wanted to retain control against women, who were playing an
increasingly important role in the rural areas, especially in regions dominated
by male migrant labor; ruling aristocracies sought to maintain or extend their
control over their subjects; and indigenous people were anxious to ensure that
migrants who settled among them did not achieve political or economic rights.
This model became popular for analyzing the contexts in which various cultural
and social practices in colonial Africa developed—from music and dance to law
and marriage.
This constructivist approach was to be fully
developed by postcolonial scholars, for whom colonialism was a regime of
material and cultural relations as well as discursive and symbolic
representations that affected both Africans and Europeans profoundly, although
in different ways. The postcolonialists sought to dismantle the image of
colonialism as a coherent and monolithic process, to transcend the dichotomy of
colonizer and colonized by problematizing, differentiating, and pluralizing
each group and mapping out their complex and shifting relations, and to specify
the cultural configurations and discourses fashioned out of their changing
identities, consciousness, interactions, and negotiations.
Postcolonialists brought into sharper focus issues
previously ignored or misconstrued in structuralist and social scientific
analyses of colonialism, especially those concerning sexuality, subjectivity,
psychology, and language. Besides the textual notions and readings of colonial
culture, analyses have increasingly come to stress the nonverbal, tactile
dimensions of social practice and the corporeal regimes of bodies, clothing,
and performances. Particularly influential have been Frantz Fanon's acclaimed
work on the psychology of colonialism and his crucial insights that
"blackness" and "whiteness" were mutually constitutive
ideological constructions. Building on Fanon's insights, scholars of Africa
have highlighted the construction of colonial mentalities, madness, and
medicine as mechanisms for inscribing and policing racial and sexual boundaries. Kwame Appiah has shown how the
ideas of race in Africa were socially constructed and how colonial and
anticolonial discourses reinforced each other to fix racial essences on bodies.
The Feminist Intervention
Many of the approaches used to analyze African
colonial politics, economies, societies, and cultures were often gender-blind
and tended to ignore women's lives, experiences, contributions, voices,
perceptions, representations, and struggles. This began to change following the
rise of the feminist movement, which emerged out of both localized and
transnational trajectories and intellectual and political struggles within and
outside the academy. While the struggles to mainstream women and gender are far
from over, African women have become increasingly more visible in histories of
colonialism, which has disrupted the binaries and chronologies that tend to
frame colonialism in Africa.
As the field of women's studies has expanded,
African women have become more differentiated in terms of class, culture, and
status, and their complex engagements, encounters, and negotiations with and
contestations against the wide range of forces described as colonial are now
clearer. From the large and diverse body of theoretical, methodological, and
pedagogical literature that has been generated in the last three decades,
vigorous debates are evident. One of the most intriguing is on the validity of
the term gender itself, with writers such as Ifi Amadiume stressing the
relative flexibility of sex/gender relations in precolonial Africa, and
Oyèrónké Oyewùmà denying the existence of gender categories altogether.
In the early twenty-first century it has become
well established that colonialism had a contradictory impact on different groups
of women, although the dominant tendency was to undermine the position of women
as a whole. Colonialism combined European and African patriarchal ideologies to
create new practices, relations, and ideologies. Earlier work on colonial
gender regimes focused on women in productive and commercial activities in the
rural and urban areas and the acute tensions in gender relations that were
created, to which the colonial state responded by tightening already
restrictive customary law, leading to important changes in family structure and
new forms of patriarchal power. The topic that attracted by far the most
attention was that of women's resistance to colonial rule. Studies ranged from
those that examined specific activists and events to general analyses of women's
involvement in nationalist struggles in various countries that demonstrated
conclusively women's political engagements and contributions.
More recent work has focused on issues of
sexuality, constructions of gender identities, and colonial representations.
According to Zine Magubane, African sexuality and its control and
representations were central to ideologies of colonial domination. In colonial
discourse, female bodies symbolized Africa as the conquered land, and the
alleged hyperfecundity and sexual profligacy of African men and women made
Africa an object of colonial desire and derision, a wild space of pornographic
pleasures in need of sexual policing. Sexuality was implicated in all forms of
colonial rule as an intimate encounter that could be used simultaneously to
maintain and to erode racial difference and as a process essential for the
reproduction of human labor power for the colonial economy, both of which
demanded close surveillance and control, especially of African female
sexuality.
Feminist studies on the construction of gender
identities and relations have helped spawn a growing literature on the creation
and transformation of colonial masculinities. Writing on Southern Africa,
Robert Morrell argues that the colonial divisions of class and race produced
different masculinities, some of which were dominant and hegemonic, and others,
subordinate and subversive, although the latter received a patriarchal dividend
over women of their class and race. These masculinities were produced and performed
in different institutional contexts, each with its own gender regime and power
relations, from the state, church, and school to the workplace and the home.
Needless to say, masculinities changed over time and manifested themselves
differently in rural and urban areas, where different gender and associational
systems existed and patterns of political, social, and political change took
place.
The Demise of Colonialism
Conceptions and analyses of colonialism in Africa
have been affected quite considerably by how the demise of colonialism is
understood. This in turn has centered on how two processes are examined—namely,
decolonization, and African nationalism or resistance—and the connections
between the two. Nationalist historians contend that nationalism was primarily
responsible for the dismantling of the colonial empires, while to imperialist
historians decolonization was largely a product of metropolitan policy and planning.
Others seek to place decolonization in the context of changes in the
international relations system. Clearly, a process as complex as decolonization
was a product of many factors. It involved a complex interplay of the
prevailing international situation, the policies of the colonial powers, and
the nature and strength of the nationalist movements, which in turn reflected
internal conditions both in the metropoles and the colonies and the ideologies
and visions of the postcolonial world. There were also variations in the
patterns of decolonization among regions and colonies, conditioned by the way
in which these factors coalesced and manifested themselves. Furthermore,
decolonization was affected by the relative presence and power of European
settlers and the perceived geopolitical strategic importance of each colony.
Similarly, the nature and dynamics of African
nationalism were exceedingly complex. Not only were the spatial locus and
social referent of the "nation" imagined by the nationalists fluid (they
could be ethnic, national, regional, and continental), but multiple secular and
religious visions of the postcolonial state vied for supremacy. Moreover,
nationalism was articulated and fought on many fronts (political, economic,
social, cultural, religious, and artistic) through different organizational
forms (from political and civic organizations to cultural and religious
movements) and in different terrains (rural and urban). The development and
impact of nationalism also varied between different colonies even among those
under the same imperial power, depending on such factors as the way the colony
had been acquired and was administered, the presence or absence of settlers,
the traditions of resistance, and the social composition of the nationalist
movement and its type of leadership.
Two key questions dominate African scholarship on
de-colonization and nationalism. The first is the social content and
composition of anticolonial resistance. By the 1980s the old accounts of elite
politics and heroic resistance had been abandoned in favor of analyses of
resistance by peasants, workers, and women, and from the early 1990s more
attention was paid to everyday forms of resistance by various subaltern groups,
including youth. In short, the challenge was to write resistance with a small
"r" rather than a capital "R" without losing, as Frederick
Cooper (1994) insisted, the connections between the subaltern resistances and
the larger and fluid constructs of colonialism. The second question centers on
the continuities and discontinuities marked by decolonization. In the 1960s,
nationalist scholars were inclined to see decolonization as ushering a radical
break with colonialism. From the 1970s, the revolutionary pessimism of Fanon,
who had pronounced decolonization false in his searing treatise of 1963, The
Wretched of the Earth, gained adherents among radical scholars who stressed the
structural continuities of colonialism. For their part, the postcolonialists,
with their fixation on colonialism, recentered colonialism in African history.
See also Africa, Idea of ; Anticolonialism:
Africa ; Empire and Imperialism ; Internal Colonialism ; Nationalism .
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Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
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Source Citation
Zeleza,
Paul Tiyambe. "Colonialism: Africa." New Dictionary of the History
of Ideas. Ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 2005. 369-375. Student Resources in Context. Web. 17 June 2016.
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