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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. These books often historicize structures that facilitate or constrain global connections, mobility and interactions, and they often present narratives that are less Eurocentric than those they write against. But they rarely raise the question of who gets to be a global historian. After all, the use of multiple archives across national borders has always relied on the possession of a strong passport and the funding of a wealthy institution. When these once marginal issues suddenly gained traction in March 2020 amid national lockdowns and restrictions on international travel, we were puzzled. Why did such issues become ‘global’ only when they started to impact particular scholars – notably those who had previously enjoyed the greatest access to resources and freedoms? Why did funding bodies start to think about these issues only once the pandemic hit? What does it mean to ‘do’ global history in a deeply unequal world? It was during an e-conversation about these questions that the idea for a seminar series entitled ‘The archives of global history in a time of international immobility’ was born.

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’.

This article uses the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), a youth international formed in Paris in 1946, as a prism through which to study how young leaders from Anglophone East and Central Africa forged transnational networks that allowed them to circumvent certain constraints of the late colonial state and the Cold War world. Adopting a regional perspective and focusing on non-state actors, the article foregrounds the importance of personal contacts, in order to travel abroad and participate in discussions about decolonisation and the contemporary world order. Mobile individuals from the region enabled IUSY to broaden its membership base, while IUSY’s specificity as a youth organisation allowed it to fashion itself in a way that appealed variably to anticolonial leaders from this region, to the colonial state, and to private foundations. The priorities of both IUSY and its contacts shifted dramatically during the period 1955-65, initially coming together in the form of study tours, and later in projects based in the region, while the approach and fact of political independence raised financial concerns as IUSY’s activities increasingly overflowed beyond the categories of ‘youth’ and ‘education'.