On 31 December 1963, a ‘burial committee’ of Central African activists led a procession to celebrate the ‘liquidation’ of the Central African Federation.Footnote 1 This particular procession did not take place within the Federation, but in Dar es Salaam, the capital of the independent East African state of Tanganyika: it was an episode in a specifically ‘East and Central’ African story. Imposed in August 1953, against the will of the African majority and in the face of a transnational campaign resisting it, the Central African Federation was a British semi-dominion comprising the protectorates of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia (present-day Malawi and Zambia), and the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe).Footnote 2 It failed to deliver economic, social, or political development for the vast majority of its citizens; over the course of the 1950s, opposition to the Federation and its byword ‘partnership’ became a rallying force of anti-colonial politics in regional and pan-African forums – as the Dar es Salaam procession indicates. Yet, during the same period, proposals for a federation of independent East African states, namely Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya, gained considerable traction among East African leaders and citizens, hailed as a bulwark to neo-colonialism.Footnote 3 Indeed, it was in 1963, the very year that the Central African Federation was dissolved, that an East African Federation seemed most possible – although ultimately the latter remained an unrealized ambition. These two federal projects were not isolated processes. As this article demonstrates, thinkers, activists, and leaders across the region during the 1950s articulated the relationship between them – a relationship that historians have largely ignored – through the lens of a broader, interdependent East and Central Africa. Even as it fuelled moments of pan-African solidarity, however, this regional lens was anything but utopian. Rather, in this case, it served to fend off perceived threats to the precarious chronological advancement towards political independence: ‘thinking regionally’ could be both limited and limiting.
During the last decade, the ‘federal moment’ has played a central role in the historiography of African decolonization, as the latter responds to the demands of global history to recognize the connectedness of decolonization from the perspective of the Global South.Footnote 4 The body of case-studies on federation, regional integration, and alternatives to the nation-state in Africa has laid to rest the narrative of ‘empire to nation’ as the inevitable dynamic of the mid-twentieth-century world, and has challenged an Afro-pessimism that obscures the breadth of past visions for the future continent.Footnote 5 Yet little has been done to conceptualize the relationship between various regional projects – despite calls for precisely this.Footnote 6 As historians assess the nature of particular federal visions – oppressive or liberatory, elite or popular, realist or utopian, constitutionally commanding or imaginatively powerful – they have been accused of neglecting to explain why decolonization, ultimately, happened as it did.Footnote 7 Asking how the existence of one federal structure – or regional imaginary, or discursive space – in one time or place engendered or precluded the existence of another allows us to penetrate these apparent dichotomies, to suggest not only how alternative visions were limited by material constraints, but how these visions could, epistemologically, themselves be limiting.
Recent work on East African integration has already exposed the complexity of regional dynamics. As Chris Vaughan has shown, although African statesmen in the late 1950s and early 1960s cast the project of East African Federation as popular and liberatory, the project served as ‘discursive resource’ to further the centralizing, nationalist interests of a small political elite, who used the idea of ‘East Africa’ to stave off demands for greater autonomy for smaller sub-national units, which centralizers dismissed as ‘tribalism’.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, ‘thinking regionally’ was not solely a pastime of the ruling elite: in discussions of regional integration in a broader (Swahiliphone) public sphere, the idea of ‘East Africa’ could be employed precisely to critique the increasingly inward-looking and authoritarian nationalism of the 1960s.Footnote 9
However, little attention has been paid to East Africa's ‘edges’ – to the question of how various actors constructed an idea of East Africa in relation to, and sometimes inclusive of, regions ‘outside’ of it.Footnote 10 In the context of the 1950s, during which democratic self-government in Africa became widely and internationally accepted as a legitimate demand, the Central African Federation (especially Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, which bordered Tanganyika) was critical in shaping how the entire region's future pathways were plotted, notably in relation to apartheid South Africa. Yet historians only occasionally venture across the border of scholarly convention between ‘East’ and ‘Central’ Africa, while the Central African Federation continues to be studied largely as a self-contained colonial experiment – not as a nation-state ‘alternative’.Footnote 11 Employing a broader East and Central African scope, this article highlights a period when the trajectories of these spaces as ‘regions’ seemed interwoven and fragile.
Rather than an overview of the different layers of this interdependence, what follows traces critical moments in the contestation of an East and Central African imaginary, viewed from vantage points across the region by way of a specific set of written sources. As historians of East African integration have demonstrated with respect to the 1960s and 1970s, textual ephemera printed and circulated outside of the remit of the state are rich sources for understanding how regional imaginaries were valuable to specific groups – a counterpoint to official state archives.Footnote 12 These sorts of sources – small batch newsletters and never-published pamphlets – as this article supports, nuance the dichotomy between elite and popular, often being produced by politically marginal intellectual elites, for a range of reading publics. This is especially true of the 1950s, given that an emerging educated, urban class in the colonial context worked within publication and mobility restrictions.
This article focuses on a subsection of this textual material in which thinkers made recurring attempts to conjure visually the relationship between historical change and geographical space. As has been shown in other cases of decolonizing Africa, attending to the ‘time-space’ that actors occupied, and experiences of temporality more generally, changes the way we can think about historical (im)possibility.Footnote 13 This article follows this lead as it traces four ‘sketches’ from the 1950s, scattered geographically and presented chronologically. These sketches show how the existence of the legally powerful Federation curtailed opportunities for East and Central African solidarity. But they also elucidate the reciprocal impact of ‘regional thinking’ on anti-colonial politics and strategy – both on the critique of multiracial partnership which was decisive to the Federation's demise, and on the possibility of imagining other decolonizations.
I
In Nairobi, July 1952, tensions were high: the mounting co-ordinated militancy of the Kenyan trade union movement in parts of the Rift Valley and Central Province would, by October, come to a head in the form of the Mau Mau uprising and a violent colonial counter-insurgency. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, some of the most senior Nairobi-based members of the Kenyan African Union (KAU), which was soon to be banned for its alleged connections to Mau Mau, were working on a different project altogether. On 29 July 1952, they formed an Anti-Federation League, with the intention of ‘consolidating public opinion’ across East and Central Africa against the proposed Central African Federation. In this, they were part of an anti-Federation campaign that peaked in 1952–3, immediately before the Federation was imposed. The campaign was inherently transnational: in Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia, efforts to co-ordinate local opposition built on existing networks of labour and education migration in the region.Footnote 14 The campaign also strengthened links between African leaders (chiefs, and office-holders in the three national congresses) and anti-colonial activists on the British left, who lobbied against Federation and hosted official delegations from Central Africa in London.Footnote 15 That East African leaders played an active role in the campaign has, however, gone unnoticed by historians.
At first glance, the Nairobi Anti-Federation League might be interpreted as a project of pan-African anti-colonial solidarity, characteristic of the 1950s. The core of personalities behind the League included Bildad Kaggia, editor of a pro-KAU newspaper Afrika Mpya (New Africa) and one of the ‘Kapenguria Six’ tried with Jomo Kenyatta; Joseph Murumbi, who would go on to play (in exile) an important role in East and Central African anti-colonial networks during the 1950s; and Pio Gama Pinto, the prominent Kenyan–Goan activist, assassinated in 1965. These men understood the proposed Central African Federation as ‘an ill-concealed attempt to substitute Colonial Office rule by a Settler-dominated government’ and called on ‘all citizens of East and Central Africa to enrol’ in the League. They envisaged mass meetings in regional capitals and ‘Local Action Councils’ in smaller towns, between whom literature would be disseminated, via Nairobi. The League would adopt a salute, the right hand raised with the thumb up (borrowed from South African and Indian resistance movements), a logo consisting of a black cross (Figure 1), and the slogan ‘Africa Forever’.Footnote 16
Anti-Federation League letterhead (1952), AB/290/2.
However, a closer reading of the League's aims, and surrounding correspondence, highlights a different aspect of its formation that tells us about how these men were understanding East Africa in relation to the wider region's past and future. The League argued that once a federation had been established in Central Africa, it would ‘only be a matter of time before it spreads North to include East African territories’.Footnote 17 The Central African Federation was itself understood as the northward ‘spread’ of South African politics: the League sought to ‘save Africa from the creeping paralysis of Malanism’, a reference to D. F. Malan, the National Party prime minister of South Africa, 1948–54, under whom racial apartheid was implemented.Footnote 18 East African leaders thus had a direct interest in the fate of the Central African Federation.
Fears, both popular and elite, of a wider East and Central African federation, with a relationship to the Union of South Africa, had a historical basis. Various plans for British colonial unions and federations had been floated since the late nineteenth century and a union of East and Central Africa specifically had arisen in several forms.Footnote 19 For example, responding to the increasing independence of the Union of South Africa from Britain over the first decades of the twentieth century, missionary Robert Laws envisaged, in 1922, ‘another great Union in Africa under the flag of the British Commonwealth bounded on the South by the Zambesi and Portuguese East Africa, on the West by Angola and the Belgian Congo, on the North by the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Abyssinia and on the East by the Indian Ocean’.Footnote 20 This idea resurfaced in the form of the Capricorn Africa Society, founded by British colonel David Stirling in 1949, which promoted a ‘progressive’, ‘multiracial’ federation of East and Central Africa as a bulwark to black nationalism.Footnote 21 Capricorn played a significant role in popularizing the idea of racial ‘partnership’ that underpinned the Central African Federation, enlisting support from a small African constituent who had an interest in maintaining the status quo or who considered self-government an unrealistic goal.Footnote 22 However, fears of what federation meant, as Luise White has shown, found their way into ordinary people's lives in the form of rumour, notably relating to the poisoning and extermination of African populations.Footnote 23 In this context, ‘Capricornist’ soon became an equivalent charge to ‘stooge’ in anti-colonial circles.Footnote 24
Kenya occupied a distinct position in this context. According to Kaggia, African leaders in Tanganyika and Uganda feared the ‘spreading’ of colonial Kenya's own racialist politics, which they considered ‘in the same camp as [Southern] Rhodesia’.Footnote 25 The political strength of Kenya's settler population and Kenya's legal status as a colony (as compared to the protectorate of Uganda or the UN trust territory of Tanganyika) limited the constitutional means by which Kenyans could protest any imposed Federation, even before the emergency regulations following Mau Mau. This in contrast to Uganda, where the exile and subsequent return of the ruling kabaka of Buganda (1953–5) over the issue of closer integration of colonial East Africa signalled the leverage wielded by anti-federalists in Buganda. Even prior to the formation of the Anti-Federation League, Pinto wrote to British Labour MP Fenner Brockway identifying the prospect of the Central African Federation as an issue ‘of the utmost importance’ to Kenya.Footnote 26
The language that the Nairobi League used implies a particular understanding of East and Central Africa in this historical moment. The League insisted that political systems ‘spread’ across borders like a plague; they cast white supremacy as a ‘creeping paralysis’, an irreversible bodily contagion. Such metaphors of human decay are frequent in evocations of decolonization; here they have specific conceptual implications.Footnote 27 The ‘spreading’ of regimes asserted the physical connectedness of the region and the impotency of political borders. This assumption, that geographical proximity to white supremacist regimes meant vulnerability to them, sketched possibilities of future political change onto the map of East, Central, and Southern Africa – time onto space. In other words, within a framework that understood one-person-one-vote democracy as a future towards which the region was ‘naturally’ moving, apartheid would historically ‘paralyse’ as it geographically ‘creeped’.
Yet, despite this sense of interdependence, the League's project faced significant material constraints. At the League's inception, its leaders had no contact with Central African political organizations, instead asking Brockway, and activist-reverend Michael Scott (chairman of the newly formed Africa Bureau) in London to inform visiting Central African delegations of their intentions.Footnote 28 Ambitions to hold a conference of East and Central African leaders ‘without giving any publicity’ (so as to maximize the chance of the colonial administration issuing necessary passports) were put on hold due to the ‘tense atmosphere’ in Kenya.Footnote 29 At the beginning of 1953, Pinto reported that the League was ‘not doing all [it] could for our friends in Central Africa’, following Kaggia's arrest.Footnote 30 Soon after, the organization was banned under emergency legislation.Footnote 31 Regional solidarity was prioritized by Kenyan anti-colonial leaders as a way to hamper the increasingly oppressive machinery of the colonial state at what appeared as a critical turning point, yet it was this legal machinery that prevented the project from taking any meaningful form.
This difficulty of practical anti-Federation co-ordination between East and Central Africa sustained a level of disconnect in how regional thinking was marshalled. In the Copperbelt town of Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, an Anti-Federation Action Committee formed as an organization of civil servants and union leaders, following the publication of the white paper on ‘Closer association of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland’ in June 1951. In the fourth issue of the committee's Freedom Newsletter, published in April 1952, Davidi Chiwelewele wrote to the editor regarding the Capricorn Africa Society's suggestion of a federation of East and Central Africa, to include Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda – precisely the federation that the Nairobi League feared.Footnote 32 Chiwelewele considered this ‘a better idea’ than the proposed Central African Federation because there was ‘more hope for African advancement in it because African progress in Uganda and Tanganyika is not held back at all by other interests’, presumably those of substantial settler populations, as well as of mining companies in the Copperbelt context. In Chiwelewele's view, this larger federation would mean that the European ‘focus points’ of the Kenyan Highlands and Southern Rhodesia ‘would be countered by the African influence between them’. The author suggested that the federation could ‘achieve a happy, and progressive and balanced development that would benefit all races’ because it would ‘be judged by the standard set by the UN’ given Tanganyika's status as a trust territory.Footnote 33 Indeed, Philip Mitchell, who was on the point of retiring as governor of Kenya, was apprehensive of an East African Federation precisely because it could result in the UN extending its mandate to Kenya.Footnote 34
Chiwelewele's was not a widely held view among Northern Rhodesian Africans, especially in the emerging anti-colonial leadership. The editorial comment that followed his letter asked readers to ‘send in some suggestion[s] which are better than [D]avidi Chiwelewele's quotation from Capricorn Society’.Footnote 35 No such suggestions appeared in the following issues, but this exchange does point to the range of opinion regarding federation. Rather than a simple ‘pan-African’ dismissal of colonial federations per se, some thought more strategically about what sort of federation could work in whose interests.Footnote 36 Chiwelewele's turn of expression resonates with the Nairobi League's understanding that politics, in this case the ‘progressive’ colonial politics in Tanganyika and Uganda, could seep outwards from East and Central Africa's ‘centre’ across national borders to the region's ‘edges’ as a counter-force to white supremacy. There appeared to Chiwelewele a possibility that a colonial federation could enable the momentum of African political gains. In 1952, at a moment when widespread African opposition to the Central African Federation seemed to have the potential to prevent the scheme from becoming a reality, reference to East and Central Africa's regional interdependence could pull in opposite directions. The dividing lines of this discussion would harden as the transnational campaign against the Central African Federation floundered.
II
In the first issue of Politica (Figure 2), published by the Makerere College Political Society in May 1953, president of the society E. D. Sawe, from Tanganyika, wrote an article ‘A graph of unrest’. In it, he sought to chart political unrest across ‘that block of country which lies between Cape and Cairo and which for convenience I call Eastern Africa’ – describing (but not producing) a graph.Footnote 37 Sawe claimed that this vast space was the region to which ‘the headlines of prominent newspapers and magazines [were] devoted’. He argued that there was a certain ‘uneveness [sic]’ in this graph of unrest, whereby ‘maximum points would be represented by Sudan-Egypt, Kenya, Central Africa and South Africa’, while ‘Tanganyika, right in the centre of this graph, would represent a minimum’. The shape of this regional interdependence, echoing Chiwelewele and the Nairobi League, was debated by Makerere's aspiring political elite during the moment of the Central African Federation's imposition in 1953. Tracing these debates reveals the importance of this regional forum in generating intellectual critique of ‘partnership’, but also the inability of this critique to smooth over the dividing lines drawn by the Federation.
Politica, 1, May 1953, AR/MAK/57/5. Reproduced with kind permission of the Makerere University Library.
In the early 1950s, Makerere College in Kampala was the only degree-awarding institution in East and Central Africa and a rare meeting point for the region's intellectuals. Founded as a technical college in 1922, Makerere catered primarily for students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, but numbers of Central African students, always a minority, rose throughout the 1940s and peaked in the early 1950s, before being stemmed by the imposition of the Federation.Footnote 38 This was also a period during which the college became embroiled in regional politics: in July 1952, almost the entire student body went on strike, with alleged links to events in Kenya; the leader of the strike had, four months previously, founded the Uganda National Congress (UNC), inviting Makerere students from across East and Central Africa to its founding meeting.Footnote 39 This political engagement was concentrated within the Student Guild and the Political Society, which in March 1953 was revived by a new set of office bearers and the launching of Politica.
Central African students were a disproportionately significant presence in these organizations; several would go on to play prominent roles in Zambian and Malawian political and cultural life, including Kanyama Chiume, James David Rubadiri, Augustine Bwanausi, and Arthur Wina. The presence of these young men pushed East African students to embrace Central Africa in their framing of Makerere. Sawe (the author of ‘A graph of unrest’), in his 1953 presidential address, stated that the society placed ‘special emphasis on East and Central Africa’ because ‘the eyes of East and Central Africa are looking to us for leadership’.Footnote 40
This inclusion of Central Africa in the self-fashioning of an emerging political elite was decisively bound up with the developing crisis of the Central African Federation. Early 1953 presented a final moment when multiple pathways for the region seemed open. This emerged in the way that Sawe used his imagined graph to make a historically rooted argument about colonial ambitions and their effects on African societies. Reframing in contemporary terms the colonial ‘Cape to Cairo’ vision of an unbroken corridor of British-controlled territories, he argued that the vision of Cecil Rhodes was materializing in ‘a colossus of [a] federal state of white supremacy under the guide [guise?] of partnership’. As Sawe saw it, partnership was simply white supremacy remodelled. This critique would become ubiquitous in anti-colonial politics as the 1950s progressed.
Rather than highlighting the structural racial discrimination that ‘partnership’ would support, however, Sawe criticized partnership as a manifestation of ‘individualism’, ‘materialism’, and a ‘lack of sympathy and spiritual unity’. Sketching out the effects on his broadly defined ‘Eastern Africa’ of what we might now call globalization, he stated:
We have invented machines to work for us and others to carry us about…machines to send messages easily and quickly. The net result is that peoples of the world have tended to come closer and closer…This contact or closeness or coming together of different nations, in Eastern Africa particularly, is to-day a materialistic affair…While man is advancing materially, he is retrogressing spiritually. Eastern Africa is thus drifting further and further apart.Footnote 41
Sawe thus observed (even before the Central African Federation existed) the paradoxical tendency of colonial integration to isolate communities, both within borders and in relation to neighbouring countries. He conveyed a sense of the transformative potential of shared values, of human agency in history – but also of the precariousness of regional solidarity.
This precariousness was revisited in another contribution in the same issue of Politica by James David Rubadiri, a Malawian on the magazine's editorial board who had spent much of his life in Tanganyika. His article, ‘African nationalism and alien rule’ traced a story of African national consciousness typical of the educated class (inside and outside of Africa) at this time: ‘the African through the vocal leadership of the educated minority became conscious of his rights or privileges brought about as a result of the spread of democracy to regard himself as also belonging to a “Nation”’.Footnote 42 That democracy could ‘spread’ would have been an idea familiar to the imperial liberalism of Makerere's lecture halls. Rubadiri argued that this nationalism, unlike in Europe, ‘has tended to bring together and cement the various African states in a common cause’. Thus, African nationalism must ‘refute the absurd logic of partnership’. However, while casting ‘partnership’ as a shared ‘African’ enemy, Rubadiri plotted a border between Southern Rhodesia and the rest of the region: he distinguished, in ‘South Africa and Southern Rhodesia…the frantic political drive to sustain a dominant white population’, presenting the country as a lost cause in the context of an East and Central African advance towards democracy.
These tensions over whose problem ‘partnership’ was soon escalated. During the months following Politica's first issue in May 1953, Makerere students, with access to colonial and British newspapers, attentively followed the closing down of opportunities for constitutional protest against the Central African Federation. The passage of the Enabling Bill in the British House of Commons on 6 May 1953 made the prospect of the imposition of the Federation very likely (district commissioners in Nyasaland were incorrectly instructed to announce that it meant Federation had already been decided upon).Footnote 43 A third reading of the bill was rejected on 24 June and the secretary of state for the colonies, Oliver Lyttelton, presented the Federal Constitution to the House of Commons on 27 July.Footnote 44 A few weeks earlier, Lyttelton had informally remarked that an East African Federation would also be broadly desirable.Footnote 45
Lyttelton's comment was reported across East Africa, substantiating the concerns that the Nairobi-based Anti-Federation League had raised a year previously, and quickly finding its way into the Makerere Political Society. The July issue of Politica engaged directly with the news: the editor of this issue, Kenyan student Munge Gatenjwa, noted the ‘untimely statement of the Colonial Secretary about East African Federation’ and wrote that there was nothing left for Central Africa but a ‘final and desperate stand’. Like the League in Nairobi, Gatenjwa considered this to have unique implications for Kenya, which risked being ‘partition[ed] into African and European zones in the Southern African fashion’.Footnote 46 On 13 July, members debated the motion ‘Now that the federation of Central Africa is an accomplished fact, a federation of the whole of East African territories should follow’, reported as ‘one of the hottest debates in the society’. They voted against it (by what majority was unreported), arguing that such a federation would be ‘a tool for the furtherance of British imperialism’ and a breach of the terms of both the Tanganyika trust territory and the Uganda protectorate.Footnote 47
As Sawe's and Rubadiri's articles had anticipated a few months previously, there was a growing sense that while Central African students saw federation as a shared problem, East African students sought to distance themselves from it. The report on the debate was followed by an article by Arthur Wina, a student from Northern Rhodesia who would later sit in Zambia's first cabinet. Wina asked: ‘Why Britain unilaterally abrogated her treaty obligations to the Africans of Central Africa’. The article made clear that the terms agreed on in the establishment of a British protectorate did not make East Africa ‘immune’ to the imposition of a federation any more than Central Africa: ‘In Central Africa and perhaps East Africa the settler communities answer very favourably to the requirements [of federation].’Footnote 48 The fate of Central Africa seemingly fixed, conversations about a regional future were dominated by a sense of foreboding and impotence more than of liberation.
These discussions came together in another visualization of ‘spreading’ political practices. In ‘Partnership and democracy’, Gatenjwa cast ‘democracy’ (building on Rubadiri's reflections in the earlier issue) as an opposing force to partnership. He argued that partnership was ‘a very contentious word, particularly in East and Central Africa’ because it had come to denote race-based representation which took no account of the fact that the ‘immigrant races’ were in the tiny minority. ‘[W]e must approach this problem as democrats’, Gatenjwa stated. ‘In a democratic society equality would mean equality between individuals, not racial groups…“Partnership”…is incompatible with democracy.’Footnote 49 In this way, Gatenjwa brought into dialogue the commonplace idea of the ‘spread of democracy’ and the threat of the ‘spread of partnership’, based on popular fears in the regional context outlined in the first section. The resulting picture for East and Central Africa was of democracy (progressive) and partnership (paralysing) as opposing forces. Where the temporal and geographical boundary between these forces lay was a debate that Makerere students were invested in.
A month later, in August 1953, this boundary was legally solidified by the birth of the Central African Federation. When Politica was relaunched in 1957, its conception of ‘East Africa’ was explicitly confined to Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar. Its front cover, in contrast to that of 1953, which depicted a bold outline of the African continent without national or regional boundaries marked, now highlighted these four East African territories (Figures 2 and 3). Although Politica maintained a pan-African perspective, devoting its September issue to Ghanaian independence for example, it largely abandoned a regional identity. When addressing ‘the rather delicate question of an East African Federation’, Kenyan student Suba-Anisi concluded that ‘the East African student does not exist as such with regard to politics; but rather he exists as a Kenya student, a Uganda student, a Tanganyika student or a Zanzibar student’.Footnote 50 As the 1950s progressed, Central African students were structurally excluded from Makerere's ‘East Africa’; moreover, their intellectual debates around partnership in 1953 had foreclosed a more radical anti-colonial solidarity. However, Central African leaders soon found alternative regional forums.
Politica, 3, Sept. 1957, AR/MAK/57/5. Reproduced with kind permission of the Makerere University Library.
III
As Politica's fate suggests, the birth of the Central African Federation in August 1953 initially hardened the boundary between East and Central Africa in depictions of the region's interdependence. This shift is visible in a 1955 pamphlet, Below and above the partnership racket, drafted by Dunduzu Chisiza, a Malawian who had been educated in Uganda and Tanganyika before working as a translator in the Federal capital of Salisbury.Footnote 51 The ‘partnership racket’ (racket as in swindle) was the Central African Federation, in a state of ‘inbetweenness’: ‘below’ the racket was the Union of South Africa; ‘above’ the racket was Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya. In a letter he attached to the manuscript when he sent it to Labour MP Fenner Brockway (who, in correspondence with the Nairobi League, had unsuccessfully lobbied for the British government to reject plans for the Central African Federation), Chisiza lamented that there was no representative of ‘East and Central African’ opinion abroad to correct misconceptions about what was happening in the region.Footnote 52 He then made a direct appeal: ‘Please do not confine yourself to East Africa’, because that region was ‘much better than Central Africa’.Footnote 53
This comparison was typical of the external appeals of Central African political figures around 1955–7. During this period, there was a sense, within the region and without, that the political trajectories of East and Central Africa had diverged in an important way – that the two regions were heading in separate directions in historical time (between partnership and democracy) and in the geographical space that had South Africa at its ‘bottom’. Tellingly, Chisiza claimed that Central African policy was ‘heading for unmasked apartheid’, while Southern Rhodesia already harboured ‘adolescent’ apartheid. While the Federal government failed to deliver on its promises of political and economic development for Central Africans, African Congresses in both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, as well as political parties in East Africa, entered into a period of internal reorganization and consolidation of local support.Footnote 54 However, from around 1955, a younger generation of leaders, including Chisiza and the personalities encountered at Makerere in the previous section, contested the strict distinction between East and Central African futures.
This contestation saw a language of comparison, as established in Chisiza's pamphlet, become a key motif in Malawian nationalist lexicon. The Nyasaland African Congress (NAC) newsletter frequently pointed out that Uganda, like Nyasaland, was a protectorate, not a colony like Kenya, printing articles such as ‘Do you know what a protectorate is?’ in November 1955.Footnote 55 NAC attempted to tie Nyasaland's fate to Uganda's – and distance Kenya from this fate. Just as debates at Makerere in 1953 jumped upon Lyttelton's remark on federation, debates in Central Africa during these years latched onto the (again widely circulated) February 1954 remark of Andrew Cohen, governor of Uganda, describing the future of Uganda as ‘a primarily African state’ as opposed to a ‘plural society’ (a term popularized by the 1956 British Labour party pamphlet of the same name).Footnote 56 Much like ‘partnership’, ‘plural’, and ‘multiracial’ had come quickly to be understood by East and Central African leaders as euphemisms for the continuation of white domination in political life, for example through minority safeguards. Chisiza's pamphlet manuscript argued, with the use of demographic data, that all states in East and Central Africa were ‘primarily African’.Footnote 57 (Incidentally, the UNC objected to Cohen's use of ‘primarily’ arguing that Uganda be considered an ‘entirely African’ state).Footnote 58
In this way, the language of precarious regional solidarity that had emerged in 1952–3 evolved, under the political fact of the Central African Federation, into one more aggressively competitive. For example, a memorandum drafted by the NAC with lobbying groups in London in April 1955 claimed that Nyasaland had the greatest claim to advancement towards self-government in all of East and Central Africa because it had (in percentage terms) the greatest African majority.Footnote 59 It noted that, prior to the Federation, Nyasaland had been ‘looking forward to’ self-government before the Rhodesias. Going further still, Chisiza, in the letter he wrote to Brockway containing the pamphlet manuscript, ventured that the ideal of ‘partnership’, unworkable in Central Africa, could in fact function in East Africa because the settler population there was aware of its role in these ‘primarily African’ territories (an observation that his contemporaries in Uganda and Tanganyika, let alone Kenya, would no doubt have challenged).Footnote 60 This comparative lens demanded that developments in East Africa should matter in adjacent Central Africa, despite the reality of the Federation.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, over the next three years, the rapidly shifting environment of international anti-colonialism saw this demand gain traction, and foster practical regional co-operation. As Central African leaders heard about, and were regularly prevented from attending, conferences with a global media profile, such as Bandung (April 1955), the first Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (Cairo, December 1957) and the first All-African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC) (Accra, December 1958), the importance of external anti-colonial publicity took hold. If, in 1955, Central Africans saw reason to make appeals to Britain based on ‘readiness’ and treaty obligations, by 1958 they were more likely to direct appeals based on inherent national rights to a growing body of newly independent states – but this required thinking regionally.
In the most tangible example of attempts to co-ordinate anti-colonial politics across the region, in September 1958 at Mwanza on the Tanganyika shore of Lake Victoria, the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) was founded, realizing the Anti-Federation League's ambitions of six years previously. Both in political science literature of the 1960s, and in recent reassessments by historians, PAFMECA has been understood within the framework of East African integration.Footnote 61 The prominence of Tom Mboya and Julius Nyerere in the organization, and the fact that a PAFMECA meeting was never held in Central Africa, have seen the ‘C’ of PAFMECA fall into the background. Instead, by thinking through the region that PAFMECA itself described, it becomes clear that Central Africa shaped PAFMECA's agenda in the context of international anti-colonialism around 1958.
Only one Central African attended PAFMECA's founding meeting in September 1958. Kanyama Chiume, from Nyasaland, had spent much of his life in Tanganyika and had been a prominent member of the Makerere Student Guild. He returned to Nyasaland in the mid-1950s, working to consolidate the support of the NAC together with other activists of his generation, including Dunduzu Chisiza.Footnote 62 Chiume's attendance at PAFMECA was not uncontroversial, however. According to the meeting minutes, Nyerere ‘explained that the meeting was originally intended to be between the Legco Members of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika…Mr. Nyerere asked the delegates to pardon him for any misunderstanding but he had hoped that nothing was intended to harm others. He took responsibility to invite the Nyasaland delegation.’Footnote 63 Inviting Chiume (the extent of the ‘delegation’) was Nyerere's personal decision, not an indication of any intention for the project to include Central Africa. Indeed, after the meeting, Nyerere wrote to Harry Nkumbula, president of the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, apologizing that invitations had not been extended to ‘brothers’ in Northern and Southern Rhodesia.Footnote 64
There were obvious reasons why East African delegates might not have wanted Central African leaders to be involved in an organization whose aim was to co-ordinate liberation movements: foreign rule in Central Africa appeared at this moment far more intractable than in East Africa. Yet, in light of Chris Vaughan's reading of PAFMECA as an instrument of East African ‘centralizers’, like Nyerere, who advocated a strong, single, nationalist party, we can understand Chiume's presence.Footnote 65 Like the Tanganyika African National Congress (TANU), the NAC could claim (however fairly) to be the only ‘representative’ African mass movement in the country. Thus, Nyerere could hold up the NAC as an example in contexts where he believed that the existence of multiple national parties hindered advancement towards independence, such as in Uganda and Zanzibar.Footnote 66
Whether Chiume's presence was a result of aligned interests or a spirit of co-operation, he succeeded in placing Nyasaland within this ‘East African’ project. His presence at Mwanza critically shaped the agenda for the meeting, and how the resolutions were taken forward. Most obviously, he put a stop to any discussion of East African Federation in PAFMECA. When the Zanzibari delegation tentatively raised the prospect of a Federation, Chiume insisted that it was ‘not fit even to discuss this subject’ given the situation in Central Africa.Footnote 67 Consequently, a condemnation of the Central African Federation appeared in the resolutions instead of support for East African integration. Like at Makerere, but at an elevated political level, the experience of an actually existing colonial federation acted as a constrictive discursive frame through which discussions of East and Central African futures took place.
Thus, Chiume made it clear that his interest was in attaching Central Africa (or at least Nyasaland) to East African trajectories – at the expense of closer East African integration or otherwise. He proposed three agenda points for the meeting, on behalf of the NAC, that illustrate why this had become a priority by 1958: (1) ‘Preparation for the Accra conference’, (2) ‘Establishment of a Joint East African Publicity Organisation’, and (3) ‘The stand of independent African states at the Accra Conference and in the United Nations’.Footnote 68 Seeming not to share Nyerere's concerns for shaping nationalist politics by way of a supra-national organization, Chiume was instead interested in how PAFMECA could amplify the voices of dependent states in East and Central Africa in a global arena. He saw that collaborating with East African leaders in appeals to international forums would lend Central African politicians legitimacy – or at least a voice when they were prevented from attending. Chiume presumably envisaged Nyasaland as part of his proposed ‘East African Publicity Organisation’, attempting to redraw the boundaries of an imagined East Africa and erase those of the Central African Federation. Although PAFMECA would, at moments during its five-year lifespan, act as a forum for bold solidarity among liberation movements, it was at its inception a reaction to a newly internationalized anti-colonialism: it ‘thought regionally’ largely for the benefit of an audience of independent African states at pan-African conferences.Footnote 69 Chisiza's comparative language was refashioned for a new context, but Central African leaders were still looking to the wider region as a defence against Federal repression – not as a radical vision for the future.
IV
The increasing centrality of anti-colonial publicity from 1958, alongside a crisis in Central Africa and political developments in Tanganyika and Uganda, also opened up opportunities for East African activists to bolster nationalist demands through reference to the wider East and Central African region. Just ahead of the December 1958 AAPC and the October 1958 elections in Uganda, the Cairo office of the UNC published an election leaflet, Uganda must be free: for independence and justice vote Uganda National Congress.Footnote 70 The cover of the leaflet showed a representation of the African continent (Figure 4). The then-independent, African-governed states (Ghana, Liberia, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, United Arab Republic, Sudan, and Ethiopia) were coloured black and boldly labelled, while the remainder of the continent was coloured white, without borders or country names; a torch labelled ‘freedom’ spanned the continent. The image is now familiar: it was an exact reproduction of that being used for AAPC publicity – except for one crucial addition. Emerging from behind the freedom torch was Uganda, boldly labelled like the independent states and shaded with black and white hatching.
Uganda must be free (1958).
With compelling parallels to the language of the Anti-Federation League in 1952, to Sawe's article in Politica in 1953, and to Chisiza's pamphlet of 1955, the map and the additional hatching worked to illustrate visually a condition of dual possibility for a future Uganda. Spatially, Uganda appeared at the southern-most tip of an expanding corridor of the map's ‘black’ states; it was (conveniently) above Uganda that the freedom torch was poised, implying that Uganda could ‘carry’ freedom south. Continuing to echo a Nkrumahist pan-Africanism, the text promised that ‘after our freedom achievement we shall not cease vigorous struggle till the whole of Africa is free’.Footnote 71 In doing so, the author of the pamphlet paid no reference to an ‘East Africa’ comprising Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, or to the rest of East and Central Africa at all, which appeared as part of a white, nameless morass.Footnote 72
Understanding the map's relationship to the contested imaginaries of East and Central Africa requires it to be placed, first, against the internationalization of African anti-colonial ‘publicity’ in the context of the pan-African and Afro-Asian projects mentioned above. In visually representing Uganda's northern ties to Sudan over any relationship with the rest of East and Central Africa, it is no coincidence that the pamphlet was published in Cairo. During the second half of the 1950s, Cairo became a hub of anti-colonial patronage for sub-Saharan liberation movements, largely in the service of President Gamel Abdel Nasser's foreign policy ambitions.Footnote 73 Cairo facilitated the UNC's pursuit of anti-colonial critique in a way that colonial publishing restrictions in Uganda prevented: another publication from the same UNC Cairo office in July 1958 claimed that the 1921 creation of the Executive and Legislative Councils in Uganda was part of the ‘colonial pattern of administration’ to ‘sponsor the federation of East and Central African Governments’.Footnote 74
Secondly, the leaflet's map must be understood against the mounting crisis in Central Africa and its relevance for East African leaders. During 1958, in the wake of non-violent mass protests and boycotts across the Federation, tensions mounted in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. On the pretext of a NAC ‘murder plot’ against Europeans, which played on Federal fears of the AAPC's ‘radicalizing’ potential, a state of emergency was declared in Nyasaland in February 1959. In a situation that paralleled that in Kenya six years previously, police murdered tens of protesters, and Congress supporters were imprisoned without trial.Footnote 75 In July, the British-commissioned Devlin Report described Nyasaland as ‘a police state’.
As Federal repression hardened, policy in Central Africa could indeed ‘spread’ to East Africa – just as East African leaders had expressed through the metaphor of disease in the early 1950s. In response to increased attempts of anti-colonial leaders to co-ordinate activities across borders as the 1950s progressed, the Federal government sought to collaborate with colonial administrations in East Africa to prevent African leaders from forming regional networks. At the beginning of 1959, Robert Armitage, governor of Nyasaland, approached Roy Welensky, prime minister of the Federation, suggesting that the existing policy to ‘curb the activities of these extremist [Central African] politicians [by] prevent[ing] their movement between various territories in the Federation’ should be extended to East Africa.Footnote 76 He used the recently declared state of emergency in Nyasaland as justification for writing to the colonial secretary in London, and to governors in East Africa, requesting that East African administrations should declare certain Central Africans prohibited immigrants ‘in response to [a] similar declaration by [the] Federation against [Tom] Mboya and [Julius] Nyerere’ – this in the wake of the latter individuals’ attempts to co-ordinate PAFMECA.Footnote 77 The sense that colonial integration projects and co-operation between African leaders pulled in opposite directions, articulated by Sawe at Makerere in 1953, played out here: the legally powerful Federation was in a position precisely to prevent the integration of the area in terms of anti-colonial politics, and attempted to export this ‘co-ordinated isolation’ to East Africa.Footnote 78
Against this backdrop, the Devlin Report's declaration of a ‘police state’ in Nyasaland was used by publicity-conscious Central African leaders to draw international attention to shrinking civil freedoms in the Federation. For example, at the second AAPC in Tunis, January 1960, Mainza Chona, caretaker of the Zambian United National Independence Party (UNIP) while Kenneth Kaunda was in prison, implied that Central Africa had been overlooked by independent African states, and protested the inadequate amount of time that had been allocated to Northern Rhodesia by the ‘so-called presidium’ of the conference.Footnote 79 In contrast to demanding a shared fate with East Africa as in the years 1955–8, leaders began to talk of Central Africa's exceptionalism and need for special consideration – and often that of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland individually.
Meanwhile, East African leaders, previously apprehensive about the Federation's proximity, became its vocal supporters. There was already a sense, as in the UNC's Cairo election leaflet, and in better-known cases such as Algeria, that nationalist support could be built around the idea of a regional ‘beacon’ for liberation.Footnote 80 The Central African emergency saw office-holders in Julius Nyerere's TANU adopt this approach wholeheartedly. In the TANU speech at the 1960 Tunis AAPC, Oscar Kambona sketched an independent Tanganyika that would be able to help ‘in a material way’ freedom fighters from Central Africa and soon host the AAPC itself – East and Central Africa's own Ghana. Central African leaders far from rejected this vision: exiled in London during 1959, Kanyama Chiume (who knew Kambona personally) told Nyerere that the latter was ‘carrying the torch of liberation in East and Central Africa’.Footnote 81
As recent research has documented with increasing nuance, Tanganyika, Dar es Salaam specifically, did indeed go on to play an important role as a regional hub for liberation movements into the 1960s, even as the integration of independent East Africa continued to face hurdles.Footnote 82 In Uganda, in contrast, the ‘torchbearer’ role that the map (Figure 4) predicted did not materialize in the same way. This makes the rhetoric around 1958–60, when these onward trajectories were not obvious, all the more interesting. Speaking to Jeffrey Byrne's argument that Global South internationalism imposed order on decolonization, these examples reveal the increasing stakes of a projection of regional solidarity along state-centric lines.Footnote 83
However, this role of East African ‘liberated liberator’, adopted in the UNC leaflet and the TANU speech, was at odds with the uncertainty of the East African trajectory, even as late as 1960. In Uganda, one-man-one-vote elections were yet to be scheduled; in Tanganyika, plans for self-government had been suddenly announced just weeks before the Tunis conference, but the process towards full independence remained unknown. With media attention focused on the Central African ‘police state’, Uganda and Tanganyika representatives at the 1960 AAPC emphasized the ongoing struggle in ways that echoed the language of police repression, even as they each carved roles as regional vanguards. John Kakonge, a delegate who would soon join Milton Obote's breakaway Uganda Peoples’ Congress, described a ‘moment of tension’ in Uganda unrecognized by external observers, in which the government was using the designation of ‘disturbed areas’ as a ‘smoke screen’ for ‘curbing, political rights’.Footnote 84 TANU's Oscar Kambona reminded the conference that despite TANU's successes, it had been ‘no plain sailing’: leaders had been persecuted and killed, and TANU branches banned.Footnote 85 East African leaders thus alluded to a common experience of colonial oppression across East and Central Africa at the same time as championing a narrative of Tanganyika – or Uganda – as Central Africa's liberator. In this balance – between describing a future of triumphant solidarity in a way that made it seem attainable, and narrating the fragility of progress towards that future in way that emphasized the need for vigilance – the reality of the Central African Federation loomed large.
V
During the 1950s, activists and thinkers committed to paper a vision of ‘East and Central Africa’ as a space of interdependent fates. These sketches direct historians to recognize, first, the inextricable relationship between the Central African Federation and aspirations for regional co-operation – one that these actors convincingly articulated – and, secondly, that ‘thinking regionally’ could itself be limiting.
The broader spatial scope adopted here, the study of which is typically precluded by assumptions based on the distinct post-colonial trajectories of East and Central Africa, exposes the tensions between the imposed Central African Federation and a wider regional anti-colonial solidarity. As the first two sections of the article demonstrated, the Central African Federation was explicitly understood as an East African problem too. The moment prior to the legal existence of the Federation was one in which two pathways, one towards apartheid South Africa, another towards a democratic future, appeared to stretch out before the whole of East and Central Africa. But the legal reality of the Federation, as the latter two sections of the article argued, complicated the possibilities for co-ordination across the region, by limiting mobility and pitting anti-colonial interests against one another. This materialized, on one hand, through the competitive language that Central African leaders used to make a claim to an East African pathway towards democratic self-government and, on the other, through the fashioning of a role as regional ‘liberator’ by East African delegates in international forums.
But the relationship between the discursive, creative work of anti-colonial actors, and the material and legal structures that contained it, is one that worked in two directions. The critique of ‘partnership’ that galvanized opposition to the Central African Federation, and the anti-colonial claims-making that held the Colonial Office accountable, relied on the region of East and Central Africa as a powerful ‘discursive resource’. It is striking, then, that the sketches of the region presented here were so fleeting: the Nairobi Anti-Federation League was banned; the Ndola Action Committee quickly ceased activities; Makerere's Politica never exceeded a handful of editions; Dunduzu Chisiza did not find a publisher for his pamphlet; Uganda's role as regional torchbearer did not come to pass; even PAFMECA was soon superseded by the Organisation of African Unity. Perhaps symbolically, Tanganyika leaders declined the invitation to join the 1963 Central African ‘burial committee’ procession that this article opened with.
This is testament, on one hand, to anti-colonial resilience in the face of the frantic draconian policies of the colonial state. More fundamentally, it is a reflection of the nature of these examples of regional co-ordination. Here, region as a discursive resource was defined – confined – by the ubiquitous threat of white settler domination and the ongoing uncertainty of any path towards a democratic future. In the examples above, this sense of threat was based on a particular mapping of an interdependent East and Central African geography onto a chronology that cast ‘partnership’ as historical step ‘backwards’ in the direction of racial apartheid. Through graphs, maps, and evocative rhetoric, thinkers and aspiring leaders thus visualized a sense that history rolls out across geographical space like wildfire – that change happens not only ‘over time’ but also ‘over space’. Bordering countries with more oppressive, ‘backward’ regimes thus loomed as possible futures: democratic advancement did not appear inevitable. But campaigns that competed to fend off these futures could preclude imagining a radical break from the past on a regional basis. Within this particular anti-colonial logic, there was a case to be made for strong, sovereign, national borders even during the decade before independence in East and Central Africa.
