Notes Essays Examples

It is only recently that historians have attempted to gain an in-depth understanding of the colonial-postcolonial transition. The transition from colony to independent nation- state is a difficult and costly undertaking as described in the three articles that are the object of this essay. The major theme running across these articles is the interaction between the European powers--France and Great Britain and their corresponding African colonies, as they try to craft modern agricultural development schemes toward the end of the colonial period and after independence. The political and economic reconstruction of the African colonies is another important point of discussion. The articles focus on the role agricultural and scientific development played in shaping African society and the modern nation-state toward the end of the colonial period and during the first years of independence.
The article by Hodge examines the careers of British colonial officers as an important historical thread of continuity across the seemingly permanent breach of decolonization and independence. 1 The careers of these British officers span several decades of service, first in the colonial government, then in the newly independent nations and finally in international organizations such as the World Bank and other U.N specialized organizations where their accumulated experience was put to use in many international aid programs. Hodge relies largely on interviews of former colonial officials long after their careers had ended. He is aware that officers may confuse or distort events after so many years and that the way they feel about their experiences when the interviews were conducted may not be the way they felt during their active years. Nevertheless, the author feels that these interviews and the written records documenting their careers provide valuable insights in understanding u the origins and history of agricultural and scientific development in Africa.
Bonneuil’s article examines the agricultural development schemes that flourished between 1930 and 1970, describing how agrarian African societies became the object of state intervention and expert knowledge. 2 Development came to be seen as an experiment and Africa as a laboratory. It is important to note that these large scale development schemes were implemented from above, disregarding indigenous knowledge about agricultural management, even though in later years scientists came to recognize the value of indigenous knowledge. Bonneuil’s article looks at the role science played in managing African agrarian societies.. Managed from above by scientists and technocrats, large scale agricultural projects were implemented forcing the resettlement of large populations, often against their will. The planned settlement schemes were state spaces where experts attempted to shape the natural and social environments in their own image, but because conditions and ideologies were different, these projects seldom fully succeeded. From these costly schemes scientists learned that small participative project not managed by the state and adapted to local ecologies stood a higher chance of success. In spite of errors committed the author points out that these schemes were crucial elements in the building of the state and expert knowledge in Africa.
Cooper’s article sketches a historical perspective of how France and Great Britain attempted to cling to their African colonies after French Indochina, British Malaya and Burma were lost to the Japanese. 3 France and Great Britain thus looked to their African colonies as their only source of raw materials and manpower to reemerge as world leaders. These European powers were caught between their desire to rebuild their empires after World War II and the realization that imperialism had ran its course as a viable political entity. Cooper points out that the transition from colonial territories to nation states was far from smooth. He illustrates his point by describing the French case. After World War II the French Empire became French Union and French colonies became French overseas territories. Complicating the matter was the complex identity of these territories; there were protectorates like Morocco and mandates like Cameroon, each of which had a different juridical status debated at length in French assemblies .Questions of suffrage, representation and citizenship wee difficult to resolve. The question of citizenship in particular brought to the surface many crucial implications: would people from the overseas territories become full citizens of the French Republic or would they have a lesser status? Would suffrage be granted to all? Would the benefits of the welfare state of the 1940’s such as pensions, family allowances, health care and education be extended to everyone under the French Union? The French government realized that incorporating millions of impoverished people into French citizenship would be a terribly expensive endeavor.
Cooper is clear in pointing out that the formation of the nation state was not a unanimous goal among African leaders. The French attempted to rebuild their colonial empire, yet not only they, but African peoples as well, concluded that this was no longer possible. African leaders such as Leopold Singhor would have preferred some form of federation that would link them to France and to other African states, but what they got in the end was the nation- state
If the previous set of articles focused on practical issues such as the role of agricultural projects in shaping the development of late colonial and post-colonial British and French Africa, the set of articles discussed below examine political and philosophical issues in the evolution of national identity. According to Anderson the concept of nationalism had its roots in Europe and spread thanks to the advent of print technology.4 The concepts of nation eventually reached the colonies in Africa and Asia through the educational system setup by the Imperial powers, but as Ziad Fahmy’s article points out, non-print media such as recorded music and popular plays, constitute important forces in shaping national identity.
According to Benedict Anderson, the convergence of print technology and capitalism set the stage for the emergence of the concept of nation in people’s mind frame.. The wide availability of books through print technology, allowed readers to frame in their minds the concept of nation without traveling widely or knowing all members of their nation.. He adds that the availability of books coincided with the rise of nationalism in Europe and in the Americas during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. . Eventually, the ideas about national identity meant primarily for Europeans, made their way to the people of the Dutch Indies and other colonies, where through standardized education, gave the colonized people the ideas with which to fight colonial regimes. Thus, turning history against them, European empires sowed the seeds of their own demise.
Ziad Fahmy’s article explains how popular culture, expressed in non-print media such as recorded music and plays spoken in vernacular Arabic, helped forge a national Egyptian national identity early in the twentieth century. 5 As men and women of all social classes were exposed to the same music, a distinctive national taste began to emerge. The author stresses the importance of colloquial Arabic as opposed to the learned academic Arabic found in classical literature. Colloquial satirical newspapers were read out loud in coffee houses, reaching the illiterate masses, but songs were directly sang by listeners without intermediaries. Literate and illiterate alike could easily memorize and distribute the song lyrics, reaching much larger audiences. These non-print media, especially vaudeville and the music industry helped create a national forum for discussing relevant political issues, class, national identity and British imperialism. The author asserts that because of the large numbers of illiterate people in Egypt the profit driven recorded and theater industries contributed more than print media to the formation of a national community. The author concludes that scholars who ignore colloquial Egyptian sources of nationalism will see the growth of Egyptian nationalism as an exclusively top-down process.
Frederick Cooper also explores the theme of transition from colony to nation-state.6 In his quest to understand decolonization patterns, he follows the change of French West African labor movements from a class- centered internationalist organization between 1945 and 1955, to a nationalist organization that subordinated its goals and interests to the emerging national parties in their struggle to snatch political control from the colonial regime. He points out that historians need to understand the ways in which different social groups mobilized within colonies to achieve specific ends, while using and opposing at the same time the institutions of the colonial regime The story of the labor movement during this transition period is the story of how workers’ collective actions forced colonial officials to grant benefits accorded to workers in France and the rest of Europe, using colonial discourse to claim entitlement to better working conditions. For some time the labor movement was able to achieve a measure of material rewards and a sense of empowerment by turning the colonial state’s affirmation of its modernizing roles into claims for the standards and resources of a European state. Debates sprang up between labor leaders who wanted to keep increasing entitlements for their trade union members and those leaders who wanted to involve the movement in struggles for political power. Cooper sees a dynamic interaction between the colonial regime and the different social and political movements within African colonies. These interactions shifted their expectations. In the end, the labor movement’s objectives were sacrificed to the ends of nationalist parties who had to concentrate the collective efforts of labor movement leaders and other social groups in their quest for national independence.
While initially France yielded to the demands of labor leaders, unleashed by imperialist rhetoric, the eventual autonomy of the African colonies relieved the colonial power from yielding to ever increasing demands for wages and benefits equal to those of workers in Europe. France gave up the idea of raising the African worker to the same living standards prevailing in Europe and the new African leaders found it necessary to suppress workers’ demands in favor of political power. Cooper makes the point that the history of the colonial period from 1945 to 1960 reveals that decolonization was not the inexorable triumph of nationalism, but rather the interplay of different forces and groups acting to arrive at the creation of the nation-state.

1Joseph, M. Hodge, “British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development.” Journal of European Modern History. 2010. Web
http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files/sites/mia/shared/mia/cours/IA023/Week%209/JMEH%2001-2010,%20incl.%20Hodge,%20Bamba%20and%20Cooper.pdf
2Christopher Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, 1930-1970.” Osiris (2000) Web
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=03697827%282000%292%3A15%3C258%3ADAESAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0
3Frederick Cooper, “Reconstructing Empires in British and French Africa.” Past and Present, (2011) , Supplement 6.
4 Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Community in Anticolonial Nationalism,” Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (1991) .
5Ziad Fahmy, “Media Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1908-1918,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. (2010).
6 Frederick Cooper, “The Dialectics of Decolonization Nationalism and Labor Movements in Post War French Africa.” Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997)

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Community in Anticolonial Nationalism.” Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Ed. Benedict Anderson. Verso Books. 1991.
Bonneuil, Christopher. “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa.1930-1970.” Osiris 15 (2000) :258-281. Pdf.
Cooper, Frederick. “Reconstructing Empires in British and French Africa.” Past and Present, Supplement 6. (2011): 196-210. Pdf.
______ , “The Dialectics of Decolonization Nationalism and Labor Movements in Post War French Africa.” Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds., Berkley: University of California Press. 1997
Fahmy Zia., “Media Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1908- 1918,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. (2010): 83-103. Pdf.
Hodge, M. Joseph. “British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development.” Journal of European Modern History. 2010. 24-46. Pdf.