This ambivalence regarding the definition of African nationalism produces very different appraisals of historical phenomena. Take, for example, the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. According to the first definition of African nationalism (whereby nationalism = anti-colonialism), it is easily construed as an African nationalist movement. This is how, for example, Bruce Berman characterised it. It was not an atavistic Kikuyu tribal rebellion, he said, but a modern national movement against colonial rule (Berman, 1991). Kofi Opoku, in a similar way, suggests that Mau Mau attained ‘national consciousness’ and ‘cultural awareness’ because it struggled for independence (Opoku, 1986). More circumspect, however, is John Lonsdale’s analysis in a book he jointly edited with Bruce Berman: even if Mau Mau was a nationalist movement, it mobilised on the basis of Kikuyu tribalism. Lonsdale is interested in the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity and concludes with the notion of ethnic nationalism: Mau Mau was an ethnic nationalist revolt, he suggests (Lonsdale, 1992: 268). He introduces this qualification – ethnic nationalism – because he knows that the history of Mau Mau sits uncomfortably with the implicit normative register of most views of nationalism (Lonsdale, 1992: 275). Firstly, it organised on tribal (ethnic) lines. It was not multiracial, nor did it imagine the time after colonialism as the time of black Kenyans. It appealed to a quasi-mysticism. It was not urban-based, nor did it attach special value to technological and economic progress. Hodgkin himself thought that there were more constructive methods of channelling African political energies than Mau Mau, which represented for him an example of a blighted ambition ‘wasted in messianic and puritanical religious movements, or … attracted to terrorism as a violent means of breaking the bonds of the plural society’ (Hodgkin cited in Lonsdale, 1992: 282). The ‘undecidability’ of the phenomenon qua nationalist centres precisely on this question of definition. At stake, ostensibly, is a historiographical problem: What facts counted as proof of national phenomena?
The temptation to treat African nationalism as the name for resistance to colonialism is, nonetheless, widespread. So pervasive has been its influence, writes Anthony Smith in the early 1980s, ‘that to this day one of the most popular views on nationalism in the “Third World” regards itself as a movement for national liberation and a reaction to European colonialism’ (Smith, 1983: 37). Smith worries, in effect, that if African nationalism were construed simply in terms of what it opposed, the impact of territorial division and bureaucratic homogenisation, key to the force and shape of nationalism, would be overlooked. Such an appraisal was also mute about the cultural features of nationalism: ‘But this is to miss much of the point behind a nationalist movement,’ he objects, ‘its ability to attract diverse groups, to renew itself after attaining independence, and to provide a basis and rationale for new social and political units and institutions’ (p. 38). In response, Smith proposes a typology and a periodisation of African nationalism. There was a phase of ‘primary resistance’ to European incursion, a period of ‘millennial protest’, a phase of ‘gestation’ and ‘adaptation’, a period of nationalist agitation for self-rule and, finally, the adoption of social programmes (p. 39).
Smith is certainly correct about the dangers of construing nationalism simply in terms of resistance. Yet we must sometimes distinguish between what the literature says it is doing and what it does in fact do. Literature from this period often goes in two directions simultaneously. It discusses African nationalism in relation to struggle, yet it also discusses it as a particular form of struggle. However, it is the view of the present book that it is better characterised in terms of an ambivalence about nationalism’s form.
For example, Ndabaningi Sithole’s 1959 history of the subject under discussion, entitled African Nationalism, documents how the ‘spirit of independence’ after World War II spread to Africa. It discusses African nationalism largely in the terms that Hodgkin defined, as ‘a move against European domination which tends to devalue the African people’ (Sithole, 1959: 24). Sithole’s text is clearly addressed to European readers, and is at pains to assure them that African nationalism is not anti-white (nor Communist), but that it merely represents the ‘fierce hunger’ of African peoples to be ‘recognized by the people of the world as their fellows and equals’ (p. 50). ‘[A]n African nationalist movement’, he states, ‘is an honest effort on the part of the African people to reassert their human dignity which the foreign powers have denied them. It is an honest effort to overthrow foreign rule that relegates them to an inferior position’ (p. 136). Yet Sithole’s text cannot be reduced to this anti-colonialism standpoint. In his account, African nationalism does not bear a simply negative relation to colonialism; it also represents the soul of a ‘new African’. Whereas it is true that the majority of Africans have not emerged from a ‘primitive state’ (p. 162), he explains, the
modern African lives in an environment in many instances totally different from that in which his forefathers lived. He is not only conscious of the country in which he lives, but also of Africa as a whole, and of the whole world …. Unlike his forefathers’ environment that hummed with bees, and that was livened with singing birds, disturbed by wild animals, and moved at nature’s pace, the modern African now lives in an environment where the mechanical bird has superseded the bird, where automobiles, trains, and tractors have pushed the ox, the donkey, and the horse into the background. … If the African forefathers should come back to life and behold their descendants on the modern scene, it is not far-fetched to say they would mistake their own children for the gods (p. 159).
Here African nationalism does not simply resist foreign domination: it is the harbinger of modernity. Even more than that, it constitutes those in Africa as African subjects per se.
The content of African nationalism became a major preoccupation, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Amilcar Cabral, founder of the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde, which sought independence from Portuguese rule in Guinea, during his address to the first Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966, worried about the ‘ideological deficiency’ if not the ‘total lack of ideology’ in the national liberation movements (Cabral, 1969: 75). Without such theory, he stated, national liberation movements would not correctly appraise the ‘foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to the social structure’ (Cabral, 1969: 75). Cabral wanted such movements to pay greater attention to the form of society after independence – independence per se was not liberation. African nationalists needed to be able to distinguish between genuine national liberation and what he called neo-colonialism: ‘To retain the power which national liberation puts into its hands,’ he argued, ‘the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois … that is to negate the revolution and necessarily ally itself with imperialist capital’ (Cabral, 1969: 89). Such a situation, Cabral continued, was a neo-colonial one (Cabral, 1969: 89).
Hence, a genuine African nationalism was one that allied with the working class to overcome imperial capitalism. At stake was the prospect of industrialised African societies not beholden to foreigners or a parasitic comprador class. Cabral was echoing concerns raised by Kwame Nkrumah the year before, in particular, that new African nations were vulnerable to the ‘extended tentacles of the Wall Street octopus’ (Nkrumah, 1965: 240). Trepidation about the form of society after independence, and hence the character of the movements calling themselves nationalist, reflected a temporal change. The task of African nationalism was no longer simply to resist and overcome colonialism. As the discourse of new governments and state officials, African nationalism looked to to a new horizon, the future, and was asking some important questions: What was a nation? How did a society become one? What was the path to national sovereignty?
Cabral posited an African nation as a socialist, industrial society, reflecting the growing Marxist-Leninist influence on African nationalism. What mattered, for him and many like him, was the particular class character of the new society and the appropriate path to development: socialism or capitalism? Hans Kohn and Wallace Sokolsky describe the situation in 1965:
In the minds of African leaders, [nationalism] is no