Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-60

Abstract

This study confronts the problem of nationalism at a particular historical juncture in British West Africa from a reconstituted methodological and epistemological framework in the attempt to provide further understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism and of the process that ended empire in British West Africa, including a historicized reflection on the terms in which empire ended and the relationship to the crises of democracy and citizenship in post-independent Africa. It explores aspects of the colonialism/citizenship interface, and the legacies, continuities, and discontinuities. It seeks to examine colonial discursive practices of community & citizenship, in particular, aspects of the political and cultural contestations in the public sphere over community and notions of citizenship between African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial social radicals, and their outcome. It inquires into how they and their organizations constructed their arguments and actions relative to each other, and what they were doing with the categories of, i.e., “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “class,” “religion,” and to what effects. The discourse of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and of colonial social radicals is conceptualized as the master-discourse and the supplementary-discourse, respectively, following Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization. The categories and analytical concepts applied in this study, including the category of social radicalism, are problematized. The study seeks to reconceptualize them in processual and relational terms and to apply them as coordinates. This work is predicated on the organizing principle of conflict to capture points of conjuncture and of continuity in transition. In reconstituting the narrative of nationalism in this period, the study also explores the category of the “communist” which was added to British imperialist discourse and applied to colonial social radicals and anybody that British officialdom did not like. It attempts to examine the effects of British imperial anti-communist framework on the dynamics of the social, political, and cultural imaginings and contestations of community and citizenship and the process that ended in precipitous decolonization. It seeks to reveal the effects of officialdom’s categorization and anti-communist grid on the social, legal, and political contexts that defined the Independence Constitutions and to fill a lacuna in the historiography of nationalism in pre-independence British West Africa.