Historicising nationalism in Africa

This paper aims to provide a critical review of historical scholarship of African nationalism as it has developed over the past sixty years. Whilst a comprehensive review of the wealth of such scholarship is impossible in the space available, we aim to demonstrate that, until recently, historical analysis of African nationalism was weakened by an overt or tacit acceptance of the African nation-states that mostly came into being at the independence moment of the late 1950s and early 1960s as the framework for analysing the phenomenon of African nationalism in general. In this paper we instead historicise nationalism as a political ideology and political force in Africa outside the boundaries of the postcolonial African state. Building on our own recent scholarship on African nationalisms and those of other scholars, the paper argues against national histories and in favour of histories that analyse the construction of African nationalisms, as opposed to African nation-states. The article argues that historical analysis should not distinguish a priori between nationalist sentiments expressed in support of the postcolonial states we now know, and nationalist sentiments expressed for forms of political independence other than the national states as they came to be. To do so, as the study of African nationalism has done until recently, is to make a post ante teleological interpretation of the past in the present that obscures the political realities of both past and present. We believe that our proposed approach can make an important contribution to understanding the genealogies of contemporary African politics. Replacing the distinction between nation-as-state vs ethnic/separatist with the idea of competing nationalisms frees analysis from historical outcome, enabling a revealing focus on historical process