Despite a fairly substantial body of recent research and publication on anti-colonialist thought and activity in various parts of Europe and the world, on the particular role of African-diasporic and/or Pan-Africanist intellectuals and activists in this, and of course on the roots of decolonisation itself, there still remain huge gaps in our knowledge. In relation to those whom Jonathan Derrick calls Africa's ‘Agitators’, we lack, for instance, substantial, properly documented biographies of George Padmore or C. L. R. James, let alone of numerous less-celebrated figures. We have no full, archivally based history of such organizations as the International African Service Bureau and the League Against Imperialism. In some key cases, the location of relevant archives – if they survived at all – remains mysterious. Some relevant earlier work, based on extremely uneven and inconsistent access to relevant sources, appears in the light of more recent discoveries to have fallen into numerous errors: and this certainly includes some germane efforts by the present reviewer.
Other major contributions to the field, right up to the present, continue to be marked, overtly or covertly, by the ideological schisms that so preoccupied many of the ‘Agitators’ themselves: liberals or social democrats versus revolutionaries, Marxists against Garveyites, Stalinists against Trotskyists, and more. Few studies of anti-colonial movements or ideas have embraced both Anglophone and Francophone milieux, let alone taken in activists in the Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, and other ‘minor’ imperial spheres. And there has been another, perhaps more surprising, kind of schism too, whereby scholars of African-American life and ideas have often operated in relative isolation from historians of colonialism (or indeed anti-colonialism) in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Thus, for instance, the African-American novelist Richard Wright draws the attention mainly of US-based literary scholars. Trinidad-born George Padmore interests students of Pan-Africanism, of the West Indies, or of Africa, especially Ghana. Yet Wright and Padmore were long-term close associates engaged in an intense interchange of ideas (probably even more so than the known surviving archival record suggests). The intertwined evolution of the two men's thoughts – whether on specific issues such as the prospects for Nkrumah's Ghana or on very broad ones such as the relationship between colonialism and modernity – would bear the kind of close investigation that the institutionalized divisions of contemporary scholarship do not seem to encourage.
Against this complex and sometimes troubled background, Jonathan Derrick's book is both a significant departure and a notable contribution to knowledge. The book has a slightly unusual history, since it derives in part from a PhD thesis dating from 1979 and largely based on research undertaken several years before that. Subsequently, its author worked as an editor for West Africa magazine and various African reference books, and is now an independent scholar and freelance editor. When a work has been so long in gestation, or is in part based on research undertaken many years ago and with a significantly different focus, the results can often be quite uneven. Most often and obviously, reference to recent research and publications may prove to be patchy and incomplete, if not downright haphazard. That is not at all the case here.
Africa's ‘Agitators’ is primarily a study of African-focused political movements, ranging from tiny – but often remarkably transnational, even global, in composition and aspiration – anti-colonialist organizations in the African diaspora, especially in Britain and France, to larger-scale but more localized protest activities in Africa itself, between the world wars. It has relatively little to say about the broader political ideas of those involved, still less about the cultural visions for which some of its key characters, such as C. L. R. James, are today probably most celebrated. To observe the latter is by no means necessarily a negative criticism: it might indeed be thought that Derrick provides a welcome corrective to the excessive ‘culturalism’ and the theoreticist overkill of some important recent writing on such figures and movements. And even if in places one might wish to know more on the intellectual formations of the book's dramatis personae, or on the conflict of worldviews and theories that (sometimes) underlay the clashes of tactics or personalities, the book already ranges very widely indeed. Most notably, it seeks to give in-depth coverage to African and pro-African agitation across its chosen period in both British and French imperial realms, and, indeed, the relations – fitful though these were – between the two. Derrick's insistence, in his Conclusions, that he ‘has only been able to deal far too briefly’ with either protest and opposition among Africans or ‘moral objection to colonialism’ from Europe and elsewhere (p. 423), is surely over-modest when his book actually breaks so much new ground on both. Even if it were wholly true, as he goes on to say, that ‘events in any particular part of Africa have been given only summary attention in these pages, compared with what could be and to some extent has been written about them’ (p. 424), that would still leave his work standing as a pioneering attempt at synthesis. But his self-assessment is, again, too modest, for there is much here that will be new to even the closest specialist.
