This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood.
Professor B. A. Ogot says:
“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.
“The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today’s world? It asks how far are Africa’s miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization?
“In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system.”
Brian Urquhart's remarkable career in the United Nations began when the UN was founded in 1945 and ended in 1986 after a twelve-year tenure as Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs—the equivalent of commander of UN peacekeeping operations. Among the many revolutions he observed during that period was the process of decolonization, which completely changed the geopolitical map of the world and the conditions under which governments seek to assure world peace. In Decolonization and World Peace, he charts the rapid progress of decolonization in Africa, the Middle East, and other areas of the Third World and describes some of its repercussions.
One of the most serious repercussions has been the chain of regional conflicts arising from the creation of postcolonial power vacuums in various parts of the world. Attributing the difficulty in resolving many of these conflicts—including the Palestine conflict and the Iran-Iraq War—to the climate of Cold War that paralyzed UN authority from the 1960s through the early 1980s, Urquhart is encouraged by what he calls a "new summer of international relations" brought on by the warming of relations between the US and the USSR.
The four chapters of Decolonization and World Peace are based on the Tom Slick World Peace lectures that Urquhart delivered at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. The appendices offer further insights into the peacekeeping potential of the UN. Included are his remarks at the Nobel Prize Banquet in Norway, on the occasion of the award of the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize to UN peacekeeping forces.
Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.
A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.
Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.
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