Search

The article contributes to a forum that discusses how publics can be studied within a global framework, specifically radio and its unintended publics. The author focuses on archival files preserved by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC).

The archives of global history I The inaccessibility of many traditional, paper archives during the pandemic is a prompt for us to think about archives in the most expansive sense. Non-paper archives were a recurring theme: built environment as archive, landscape as archive (in Tereza Valny's work), inaccessibility as archive. Reading the acknowledgements section of any book that might be categorized as global history, one comes across a long and impressive list of archives, frequently spanning multiple continents. Despite the growing number of publications and seminars seeking to define the field, the "archive of global history" has not been conceptualized or theorized to the same extent as, say, the archive of intellectual history, or the archive of African history. [Extracted from the article]

This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya's second vice-president. It follows Murumbi's engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practical coordination of internationalism; in London he pushed British activists to take a more internationalist approach to anti-colonialism in a case of 'reverse tutelage'; disillusioned with the British Left, in Scandinavia and Israel he questioned the translatability of community development and the practical role of external sympathisers as Kenyan independence approached. Murumbi's trajectory confirms the inseparability of internationalism and nationalism in 1950s Africa, reinserting internationalist thought into narratives of Kenyan freedom struggles and suggesting how alternative visions for post-colonial Kenya were lost. Moreover, we argue, this reassessment of Murumbi's life advances the burgeoning scholarship on internationalisms in the decolonising world by showing that Murumbi's internationalist practices and his interest in the supposedly 'local' question of community development drove one another. Murumbi thus shows us a particular set of entanglements between the 'local' and the 'global'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the 'Bandung moment', pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the 'globalisation of decolonisation' but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African liberation and the global Cold War, 1961-1974: George Roberts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), xvi + 288 pp In I Revolutionary State-Making i , Dar es Salaam serves as a window onto the Cold War world. I Revolutionary State-Making i is an important book, both for locating the global Cold War in the streets and secrets of post-independence capitals, and for demonstrating the extent to which the history of state-making - and state control - is inescapably international. [Extracted from the article]

This article assesses the relationship between the imposed Central African Federation (1953–63) and the ways in which East and Central African thinkers and leaders conveyed and pursued the possibilities of decolonization. Existing literature on federalism in twentieth-century Africa fails to place regional projects in dialogue, studying in isolation East Africa and Central Africa, 'utopian' and oppressive regionalisms. But such clear dividing lines were not articulated in the four discursive 'sketches' of East and Central Africa that this article brings to light: those of anti-Federation organizations in Nairobi and Ndola in 1952; students at Makerere College (Kampala) in 1953; mobile Malawian activists in regional and pan-African forums around 1955–8; and East African party publicity representatives around 1958–60. At each of these critical moments, thinkers creatively constructed various relationships between geographical space and chronological change, through the lens of a broader, interdependent East and Central Africa, as a means to fend off perceived threats to a precarious advancement towards a democratic future. Attending to the evolution of these ideas shows not only how the Central African Federation placed material constraints on regional solidarity, but how 'thinking regionally' could support the case for national borders, even before decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]