The Cold War plays an increasingly prominent role in recent historical works on Africa’s decolonization. Whether it be in terms of violence, ideology, mobility, or patronage, the replacement of ebbing European empires with encroaching Cold War powers often stands at the center of analyses that explain the premature collapse of pan-Africanist political projects. In his extraordinarily ambitious and deeply researched book, Frank Gerits contests the view that the Cold War was a “static, realist world system that crushed emancipatory political projects” (12), and instead turns our attention to the work of African “liberationists” led by Kwame Nkrumah, who were far more independent, interventionist, and impactful than historians have allowed, particularly in the realm of public diplomacy. Gerits rejects characterizations of anticolonial African nationalists as utopian avatars of noble paths not taken, and instead focuses on the measurable impacts that such “liberationists” had upon the international order. “By approaching ‘liberation’ as a set of concrete responses to the same challenges that Communism, capitalism, and imperialism sought to tackle,” Gerits argues, “anti-colonial ideologies are taken out of the haze of utopianism and positioned as consecutive parts of twentieth-century diplomacy” (17).

The Ideological Scramble for Africa offers a public diplomacy history of postwar Africa, drawn from the perspectives of African nationalists, exiting imperialists, and Cold War superpowers. At the heart of African ideological action is what Gerits terms anticolonial modernity, a search for “a better modernity initiated by Haitian revolutionaries” (39). The main battleground of decolonization was not development but psychology. Postwar European empires (save Portugal) invested heavily in education and other forms of cultural assistance to enact a psychological modernization, while Kwame Nkrumah led the pan-Africanist response by forming an exportable ideology which Gerits describes as a “modernization scheme of cultural integrity and continental unity through conferences and a network of activists” (63). In this light, Nkrumah’s bold stances against French nuclear testing and Katanga’s secession are works of psychology-minded public diplomacy designed with theatrical qualities, toward the end of “immunizing” Africans from the psychological intrusions of late imperial and Cold War interventions on the continent. Nkrumah’s leadership over this movement ebbed with the rise of more practical-minded regionalist projects led by Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda by 1964 — part of a broader shift towards regionalism that Gerits argues had far more receptivity from the “Global North” than is often credited. One of the book’s main arguments concerns a re-periodization of decolonization, in which the collapse of anticolonial modernity by the mid-1960s came about not only by this turn to regionalism, but also by younger African leaders’ willingness to turn to Cold War superpowers as “the only actors capable of carrying out the Herculean task of modernization” (176), thus ending the continent’s psychological moment and heralding its belated entry into the Cold War system.

The book suffers from three defects. First, there is something of a mismatch between the spirit of the main claims and the nature of the evidence. The book’s cornerstone argument — that the “anticolonial modernity” pursued by African nationalists stands in a long tradition of inverting the universalism of the European Enlightenment that dates back to Toussaint Louverture — carries the hallmarks of a speculative essay. The psychological ambitions of Nkrumah’s oft-dismissed writings on the “African personality,” Gerits argues, lie within this wider intellectual genealogy and warrant more serious consideration from diplomatic historians. Fair enough, yet the execution of this and similar arguments is carried out through intensive diplomatic archival research — a method better suited to a more narrowly defined monograph concerned with short-term sequences than to a broad history of ideas. Second, some arguments lack conceptual clarity. “Anticolonial modernity” itself is never clearly defined; modernity and modernization are often deployed interchangeably, a conflation of condition and process that, among other things, undermines the book’s larger ambition to distinguish ideological from materialist roots of African diplomatic initiatives. Third, questions linger regarding the representativeness of sources. Claims about general policy are illustrated primarily through fresh archival finds rather than through conventional policy documents or summaries of secondary literature. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, for example, loom large in the book’s early chapters as critics of the “old Imperialism” who seek to place Africa on a more modern footing through cultural assistance programs, but so too do obscure United States Information Service officers; all arrive at “a shared diagnosis of African psychological weakness” (39). Yet, few of the sources used to illustrate this point are taken from considered policy documents; many come either from passing observations made by presidents or other policymakers amid discussions of more materialist-minded aid projects, or from reports of policy implementers. The author subsumes the wider context of postwar American public diplomacy and analysis of its main tools and goals to hard-won archival sources in the presentation of evidence, seemingly unwary of the latter’s possible peculiarities.

Oddly, Gerits draws little attention to what is the book’s main strength, its improbably wide comparative analysis of approaches to Africa’s decolonization — not just for African states like Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Zambia, but also the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal, with smaller actors like Italy and Czechoslovakia occasionally added in. To sustain this level of systematic comparative analysis based on original archival research from all of these countries (except Russia) across two decades of events is an immensely impressive achievement; I can think of no other single-authored work that comes close to accomplishing this. For this reason alone, Gerits’s book will become required reading for scholars working in the field of international diplomacy and African decolonization. Extraordinary on the “Global North,” this comparative work is somewhat more modest on the African side, though the analysis of Ghana in particular is enriched by a trove of revealing archival finds that highlight the inspired if imperious nature of the country’s expansive pan-Africanism. In addition to uncovering new sources in several languages, the author also has a knack for crisp and effective historiographical summary, which offers both a useful service to make sense of the sprawling field of African decolonization, as well as effective points of intervention for the book’s arguments concerning the importance of psychology-minded public diplomacy. There is much to admire in this important if overly ambitious book that should generate new debates about the significance of African political ideology and its periodization during the continent’s decolonization.