Paper short abstract:

As shown by the FLN’s use of « city diplomacy » and African ruralities with its British interlocutors, the spatialisation of African independence movements structured European anticolonial activity, influencing both depictions of nationalist movements and policy decisions.

Paper long abstract:

During the war of Algerian independence, a number of committed British activists travelled to North Africa and Africa to meet FLN representatives : on their return, some lobbied the British government and administration in favour of the FLN, and most recounted their experiences in a number of public speeches (including in Parliament) and in a variety of publications and photographic reports, notably in the press. By 1957, several spaces had become the focus of attention of the government, the voluntary sector and anticolonial networks in Britain : North African cities, centres for refugees (sometimes rural, sometimes urban) and the Algerian maquis. In Algeria, parallel visits organised by the French government used the Algerian space (including the Sahara) to promote ideals of modernity and growth, in both urban and rural settings. This paper investigates the ways in which each space was used by the FLN to bring out particular strands of its liberation diplomacy to its British interlocutors, within the wider global context, and assesses the respective impact of these spaces on British anticolonial activists. Based on a variety of archives, this paper demonstrates that the spatialisation of independence movements in Africa, often underplayed, was in fact a structuring element of anticolonial activity in Europe, influencing not simply depictions of nationalist movements but policy decisions. It also shows that the « city diplomacy » of the major panafrican conferences, like Tunis in 1960 and Cairo in 1961, was rendered more effective by a wealth of other initiatives based on African ruralities.