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- Convenor:
-
Lena Dallywater
(Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussants:
-
Chris Saunders
(University of Cape Town)
Helder Adegar Fonseca (University of Évora)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- African Studies
- Location:
- Room 1224
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Drawing on new sources, the panel explores networks that were shaped through the movement of individuals and ideas from Africa to the "East" and from the "East" to Africa in the mid-20th century. It casts new light on the role of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the decolonisation of Africa.
Long Abstract:
Adopting an interdisciplinary, transregional perspective, and inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, the participants in this panel will aim to cast new light on aspects of the role of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the decolonisation of Africa. The panel, which is designed as roundtable discussion, will draw on new sources to explore some of the networks that were shaped through the movement of individuals and ideas from Africa to the "East" and from the "East" to Africa in the decades in which African countries moved to independence. It is now widely recognised that a Cold War perspective falls short in unfolding the complex geographies of such connections and the multipolarity of actions and transactions, some of which continue to influence relationships today. The history of the ties that existed between African liberation movements and the socialist bloc will be of particular interest, taking further themes explored in a collection of essays published by the organisers of the roundtable in 2019.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Chris Saunders (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper introduces new perspectives on the influence and impact of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on aspects of the history of West and South Africa in the years of African decolonization in the late twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
Building on the new work by Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor on the role of the Soviet Union in the making of the armies of the Zimbabwean liberation movements, this paper introduces new research on the involvement of the Soviet Union in the Nigerian Civil War and on Soviet Bloc connections with Southern African liberation movements, including the African National Congress of South Africa and the main opposition party in Lesotho, the Basutoland Congress Party. These connections included, besides the supply of military equipment, educational scholarships and other forms of material assistance. In the cases of Namibia and South Africa, this support was crucial to the armed struggles waged by SWAPO and MK, but the paper will go on to argue that this does not mean that Soviet Bloc support was key to the ending of apartheid. Apartheid ended first in Namibia, then in South Africa itself, in different ways. Paying close attention to chronology, the paper will analyse and challenge some of the writings by Russian historians on Soviet policy in the late 1980s and will argue that the main impact of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on the end of apartheid in South Africa was negative: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 provided an opportunity for the apartheid regime to abandon previous policy and accept the idea of a negotiated settlement. The abandonment of the remaining apartheid laws was a necessary part of that settlement.
Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The paper poses fresh questions about making liberation armies in exile, using the ZAPU/ANC campaigns in 1960s Rhodesia. It explores how shared Soviet influences sat in tension with north African training, a Cuban revolutionary imaginary, and cadres’ ideas about politics and military masculinity.
Paper long abstract:
The foreign training of southern Africa’s liberation movement armies was powerfully shaped by the eastern bloc, but as a new literature has begun to explore, this was a mutually constitutive project that encompassed a great range of contradictory influences and much more wide-ranging networks. Based on oral histories, this paper looks at the making of the joint ZAPU/ANC detachments that fought in the most ambitious military venture (for either movement) of the 1960s, the 1967/68 Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns in Rhodesia. ZAPU and the ANC shared Soviet support and training and enjoyed recognition as ‘authentic’ movements, as well as sharing other political, cultural, and social ties – but neither can be reduced to these shared attributes. The paper explores how, in each of these movements, Soviet instruction and ideas sat in tension with training in a range of north African sites; how training in all these sites was situated in relation to an imaginary of revolutionary warfare based most powerfully on Cuba and the figure of Che Guevara, both of which were encountered in schools, media, books and camps; and how different ideas of military masculinity and bodily power, rendered in relation to politics as well as ethnicity, shaped contrasting ideas of a ‘good soldier’. The debates sparked among and between ANC/ZAPU cadres as they crossed these varied terrains, carrying ideas, experiences, and bodily performances with them, were profoundly significant: they constituted military authority and strategy but also fed mutiny and deep divisions that would devastate both movements.
JoAnn McGregor (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
The paper revisits ZPRA/ZANLA conflict when mutually hostile stereotypes of the other as product of Soviet/Sino sponsors were reproduced. It stresses the importance of understanding vernacular, corporeal everyday expressions of martial masculinity that rival movements inculcated through training.
Paper long abstract:
The ‘Sovietness’ of ZPRA military culture versus the ‘Chineseness’ of ZANLA is often invoked in part explanation of deadly conflicts between the two rival Zimbabwean liberation armies, when the OAU brought cadres into shared camps in Tanzania and Mozambique under the auspices of ZIPA. The paper revisits an episode that is central to the reproduction of stereotypes of differences between the two. It aims not only to unpick more complex internationalist influences at a particular conjuncture in ZPRA’s war, but also to explain why a simplified opposition of Soviet vs Chinese impacts could flourish among ordinary soldiers. It uses oral histories to provide new insights into cultures of military training, focussing on ZPRA’s notoriously harsh regime formalised at Morogoro camp. The Sino-Soviet divide was not only part of the global Cold War architecture and part of commissars political instruction in each movement. It was also part of the vernacular internationalist political repertoires of mutual insult hurled between ordinary cadres in ‘integrated’ camps, inculcated in embodied form during training and manifest in a multitude of material and performative ways. New insight can be gained into these devastating conflicts, the paper argues, by better understanding of specific regimes of training, the divergent corporeal martial masculinities they inculcated and everyday interactions among soldiers. The mutually damaging stereotypes underpinned by a simplified binary of Soviet/Sino backing that fed conflict were reinforced in its wake, casting a long shadow not only over later stages of the war, but also into independence.