Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the press to explore popular understandings of the meanings of “freedom” in decolonizing Ghana and Nigeria. While political leaders struggled over the structure, ordinary women and men developed diverse and often highly cosmopolitan ideas about what freedom should look like.

Paper long abstract:

The historiography of decolonization in West Africa has little to say on the intellectual content of popular support for independence. While there is a substantial literature on the ideas of the leadership of anti-colonial movements, we know little about the aspirations of the masses who supported the political movements that these men led. By the early 1950s it was widely understood that Nigeria and the Gold Coast would achieve independence within a few years, but what was this “freedom” that was widely anticipated? This paper draws on print media to explore what it was that people were imagining independence would bring. The question was rarely addressed directly; nevertheless, the press provides a rich resource for identifying those expectations and their diverse expressions defined often by class, age, and especially gender. If Kwame Nkrumah famously asserted “seek ye first the political kingdom,” many of those ordinary people who supported him and other leaders were plainly more interested in other, more material, kingdoms. In the vibrant popular culture worlds of West African cities and towns younger women and men meshed local and global cultural impulses and fashioned often gendered and cosmopolitan notions of freedom that disconcerted their elders, colonial authorities and eventually the often puritanical and repressive leadership of independent regimes. In those exciting years when citizens of states-in-the-making looked forward to the future, many saw freedom less in terms of cultural independence than in full membership in global cultural communities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper unpacks non-elite Nigerian women’s expectations of independence during the late colonial period in Nigeria using newspaper resources.

Paper long abstract:

With the achievement of flag independence in 1960, Nigeria’s political question was resolved. Yet to what extent were other economic questions determined? Kelly has convincingly demonstrated how gender complicates how periodisation in history functions, and, thus, argued that “significant turning points in history” impacted each sex differently (Kelly, 1986). Similarly, this work interrogates the case for colonial non-elite women by asking new questions of these old actors during the late colonial era of decolonisation. First, it will ask what these women understood by independence. Did they envision the same freedom as espoused by the educated and political elite? How can newspapers or not uncover non-elite women’s expectations at the end of British rule in Nigeria? This paper will explore these questions using Nigerian and African American newspapers from the late 1940s.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores non-official expectations of independence during years following Mozambican independence (1975-1978) through the perspectives of men and women who were considered Youth at the time.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores non-official expectations of independence during years following Mozambican independence (1975-1978) through the perspectives of men and women who were considered Youth at the time. When the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (Frelimo) took over the state institutions from Portugal in 1975, their ambitious plans to bring about a New Socialist Society targeted among other social groups ‘the Youth,’ as active agents of the moral revolution that was thought to consolidate the values of the party in the hearts and minds of generations to come. Many young people took up this call with great enthusiasm, organising into reading groups and initiating voluntary work in support of independence and the party. For some of them, however, the tables quickly turned. With the foundation of Frelimo’s own Youth Organization, the Organizacao da Juventude Mocambicana, the party began to replace bottom-up independence enthusiasm, with top-down dissemination of its own version of the correct values of independence. Through branches of the OJM down to the level of the neighbourhood, Frelimo sought to transmit the new morality of independence to its young audience, using dance, poetry, song, theatre but also policing and punishment – distilling and forging what would later become the official history of independence.

This paper explores the above history through media sources, as well as oral history interviews conducted with members of the OJM and unaffiliated men and women who considered themselves Youth during the early years after independence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how comics were appropriated by key institutions and local populations in the Copperbelt (DRC-Zambia) around independence. This, as will be argued, allowed them to be used both to promote a vision for a prosperous industrial future and to bemoan its failure to materialise.

Paper long abstract:

The Copperbelt mining region, straddling the border between Zambia and DRCongo, has long been associated with various influential forms of popular arts. One such artform has, however, remained relatively under the academic radar: comics. Yet not only were they an integral part of life on the Copperbelt by the 1950s, but they also became a major channel through which to vehiculate ‘messages’ and hold public conversations. In the wake of independence, acknowledging the popularity of the medium, several institutions began producing their own youth magazines. This included southern Congo’s all-powerful mining company, Gécamines and Zambia’s Ministry of Education and Franciscan Mission. These magazines were created to ‘educate’ their young readers, ‘steer’ them towards certain careers, and generally inspire them to help building the country’s future, the expectation being that this future would be industrial and prosperous. The audience responded by indicating which comics they preferred and producing their own, while also discussing their hopes and doubts in the ‘letters to the editor’ section. While such magazines were commissioned by the ‘powers-that-be’, they provided aspiring cartoonists with the opportunity to appropriate and transform the medium. Crucially, this reappropriation took place against the backdrop of fast economic, political and social changes, especially after the dramatic downturn in copper prices of 1974–75. In this context, this paper will explore how comics were both deployed to promote a vision for an industrial and ‘modern’ future and later to critique the failures of modernity and the corrosive effects of economic decline.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what insights company records of the United Africa Company (UAC) can provide in the question of the expectations that West African employees of European-owned enterprises had of independence.

Paper long abstract:

In the years before the formal achievement of flag independence, tens of thousands of African workers were employed by European enterprises on all levels from manual labourer to mid-level management. What would independence mean for their jobs? Would it lead to rapid promotions as Africanisation policies were expected to result in more African managers? Or would the potential for nationalisation or a forced retreat from former colonies endanger their job security? Studies of the responses of European business to decolonisation have looked at political and business strategies, business planning and investment decisions – including business links to nationalist politicians – but much less is known about the expectations of ordinary employees. Were their expectations similar to those of other colonial subjects, or did they perceive their interests and opportunities to be different? This paper will explore this question on the basis of company records mainly relating to the United Africa Company (UAC) – one of West Africa’s biggest private employers from the 1930s to the 1980s.