After the Second World War, Africans no longer sought to reform the colonial project, they wanted it to end. At the same time, European nations reluctantly lost the will and the financial wherewithal to maintain their African empires. Both groups, for different reasons, looked for a way out of the imperial project. While the metropoles searched for ways to maintain the benefits of empire without the formal structures, African leaders looked to the rebirth of their lands as independent nations. While African independence movements have often been thought of as actions with no supporting bodies of thought, this is far from the truth. This seminar explores how African political leaders strove to liberate and recreate their lands and the ideological bases they developed in response to many challenges including how to accomplish decolonization, the role of African "tradition" in the face of "modernity," the economic structure of the nation, citizenship, international relations, and mitigating the effects of the colonial past.
History 299