Temporalities of Struggle: Beginning and Belonging in the African Socialist Tradition

Abstract

In this dissertation, I ask how temporality and emancipatory politics influence one another, and how they should do so in an era shaped by colonialism and racial capitalism. I investigate these questions through the historical and geographical context of African liberation struggles. Dominant interpretations of the mid-20th century fights for formal independence view them primarily as fights for self-determination and development that ultimately failed to deliver on those promises. Such approaches tend to homogenize and dismiss these projects as bygone tragedies motivated by pragmatic, derivative, or context-bound ideas. As a result, they overlook the ways that these leaders, activists, and artists repeatedly emphasized competing temporalities to justify their policies, articulate demands, and debate with one another. Further, they obscure the ongoing value of those movements’ philosophies and their insights into the politics of time.

I show how African socialist thinkers, broadly understood, characterized their fights for freedom as fights over time: over interpreting pre-colonial and colonial pasts, asserting agency within chaotic presents, and imagining different emancipated futures. People generally misperceive time as a natural background condition for politics (we do everything “in time”) rather than as an object for political reflection and contestation. Political theorists have recently shown how authorities manipulate time to facilitate domination or shape communities through clocks, calendars, ‘wait’ times, or civilizational narratives. Still, these studies do not adequately compare how different temporalities interact or offer competing avenues for political struggle. By using temporality as a lens to study anticolonial thought and struggles, I compare and evaluate the strategic significance and philosophical coherence of different temporal frameworks. Across five substantive chapters, I follow a narrative arc that begins with the “creation” of capitalist time, contests how “continuity” and “rupture” unfold in colonial domination and anticolonial action, presents the challenge of comparing these through the dramatization of “cyclical time,” and explores how to establish new regimes outside of provincial experience by invoking the “pre-political.”

With this interpretive focus, I highlight the diversity of African socialist projects and the stakes of that diversity by demonstrating how temporality became a key feature at issue in their efforts to resist colonialism, build nations, and distinguish their projects from one another. Moreover, I defend the ongoing political and philosophical importance of these projects that are often dismissed as locally bounded and historically foreclosed. Among my examples, I include subnational resistance struggles by the Maasai in East Africa, dramatic works by Wole Soyinka, and writings and speeches by Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and Obafemi Awolowo. Most recent theoretical studies of these and other African political projects focus mainly on international relations or explicating indigenous philosophy. Instead, by focusing on how they approach to the problem of time, I clarify how African socialist movements draw from and respond to different traditions and scales of political community. In doing so, I present a clearer narrative of how African socialist thinkers interpreted their own challenges and I bridge the gap between their context and the present. As an historical and critical project, each chapter sustains a thematic conversation around time and decolonization while intervening into theoretical debates about primitive accumulation, democratic socialism, universalism, agency, and social contract theory.