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- Convenors:
-
Dan Hodgkinson
(University of Oxford)
Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia)
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Short Abstract:
The US war in Vietnam was critical in shaping state-level international relations as well as subversive ideas and networks of solidarity and political activism in the 'Long Sixties'. This panel explores the war's effects in Africa on political ideas, activist organising, and state-society relations.
Long Abstract:
The transnational dimensions of sixties and seventies social movements, political ideas, military exchanges and popular protest have been the subject of innovative recent scholarship on the 'Global Sixties' in Africa and southern African liberation movements. Strikingly absent from many of these recent studies, however, is any serious engagement with the discursive and material connections between this era's African political struggles and the US war in Vietnam. While more proximate events, such as the Algerian War, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia played important roles in shaping how Africans imagined and agitated for new political possibilities during these years, the war in Vietnam was nevertheless a significant issue on the continent. In this panel, we aim to re-evaluate how the Vietnam War affected both the politics of popular protest and postcolonial nation-state building in Africa. We seek papers that address the following questions: how did African states official responses to the Vietnam War differ across space and time? How, if at all, did such responses shape institutional and public space for the expression of alternative forms of politics among Africans, particularly young people? To what extent did anti-war protest movements provide young and politically engaged Africans with new languages of dissent and international networks of solidarity to express their grievances and to agitate for political change 'at home'? And what do such political activities reveal about state-society relations within African states during this period?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -George Roberts (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the relationship between the Vietnam War and Tanzanian socialism. It demonstrates that while the government used youth protest against the war to pursue its nation-building efforts, it was also concerned about the effects of radical polemics on its non-aligned foreign policy.
Paper long abstract:
In the Western experience of the 'long 1968', protest against the Vietnam War often formed a focal point for a broader countercultural movement which presented the conflict in Indochina as the apotheosis of neo-imperialism and the abuse of state power. But in Tanzania, the resolute anticolonial foreign policy adopted by the government of Julius Nyerere meant that the energies of street protest and press invective against the American-led war in Vietnam were channelled into state-building efforts. While acknowledging that the echo of the 'Bandung Moment' influenced Tanzanian responses to the Vietnam War, this paper argues that focusing on transnational Afro-Asian solidarities obscures the government's use of anti-imperial rhetoric to bolster its own claims to power and suppress opposition under the idea of 'vigilance' against neo-colonial threats. Yet this involved a difficult balancing act. While student leaders and newspaper polemicists were at times encouraged to criticise the United States, the government was conscious that such rhetoric might undermine its carefully constructed, non-aligned foreign policy, especially given Western commentators and diplomats already regarded Tanzania as being under Chinese influence. Youth wing leaders and newspaper editors were therefore issued both private and public warnings about the need for self-restraint in their language of protest. This study of Tanzania's engagement with the Vietnam War therefore serves as a window onto the relationships between international diplomacy, grassroots politics, and the mechanics of socialist state-making in post-colonial Africa. In the process, it raises critical questions about historians' use of the labels 'national' and 'transnational'.
Dan Hodgkinson (University of Oxford) Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia)
Paper short abstract:
Rooted in African archival sources and oral histories, this paper explores the hitherto neglected role of the Vietnam War in both progressive and conservative politics in Kenya and Rhodesia during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Paper long abstract:
This paper compares the various ways in which the Vietnam war was used in Kenya and Rhodesia. In both of these states, young people - particularly students - gave their own local struggles international significance by discursively situating them in global frames of reference. No event was greater in this regard than the Vietnam War. Tracing how and why young Africans used the Vietnam War in local politics opens up our understanding of how international struggles were imagined and their salience in Africa. Yet the Vietnam War was not only invoked as an emancipatory symbol of struggle, but also as a counter-revolutionary emblem of international communism by both the Kenyan and Rhodesian government. This ideological positioning as Anti-Communist was critical to the development of the state in both these contexts. Hence, Vietnam played an important if under appreciate role in African politics during these years.