Teaching Decolonization beyond the Nation: The Case of West Africa

Mark L. Reeves

The Problem of Teaching Decolonization

     How should we teach the history of decolonization, especially in a wide-ranging survey course? Debate has typically raged over whether we should emphasize the actions of imperial governments over independence movements, and vice versa. However, yet another thorny question rears its head: what did "decolonization" really mean? Often we teach students about decolonization by simple statements such as, "India gained independence from Britain in 1947." From this statement, a student would presume that the country "India" pre-dated its colonization by Great Britain, and then emerged from that subjugation, whole again, in 1947. While a teacher would likely complicate that statement by acknowledging that "British India" actually split into states, one named India and the other "Pakistan," the student with little background knowledge might take this to mean that a previously unified India was then split in two.

     But British India—and all colonial polities—was always more complicated than this simple story. Ramachandra Guha's accessible and useful study of India since 1948 lays out how the post-independence state of India had to actively re-integrate princely states which the British had left carved out of the Raj. In short, Britain granted independence, but only over the next several years did Nehru's government make India a unified state.¹ Even now, India remains a federal system, making the concept of a singular "nation" complex at best, as readers of U.S. history will know well. Like India, the United States were united after independence, as its leaders sought to make e pluribus unum, an ideal tested up to the point of civil war.

     By telling our students, "India gained independence from Britain in 1947," we accept the narrative of nationalists: that unified nations had existed from time immemorial, that they had been interrupted by foreign colonization, and their history could resume once they became independent. Unwittingly, we as teachers perpetuate the idea that the world is divided into ineffable nations, which ought to be represented through singular states. This not only ignores how what we identify as the quintessential "national" states, such as Great Britain, France, and Germany, have in fact been empires, ruling different communities which saw themselves as "nations."² This perspective also tells our students that nations are the natural form of political organization, and that other forms of political connections are abnormal or less legitimate. Unintentionally we may be laying the foundations for our students to think of community in exclusive, rather than inclusive, terms.

     So how do we change the narrative? The nationalist narrative seems simple enough, after all: it is true that since 1945, the number of states in the world has expanded exponentially, and most of these new states' leaders would portray their governments as representing a longstanding "nation" who have now emerged from colonial subjugation. Part of thinking historically, however, is to point out that present conditions did not arise naturally, but out of contingency—that is, out of history. To teach our students how decolonization unfolded, we need to emphasize that although the nation-state seems to have triumphed, this triumph was never inevitable. Nor is it permanent, and current disruptions to the international order demonstrate, from the construction of a so-called "caliphate" in the ruins of Syrian and Iraqi nation-states to conflict over how to make Europe an ever closer union.

     This article provides teachers with examples of how decolonization might have turned out differently, specifically in the context of British and French West Africa. As an example of the sort of research and teaching I am proposing, in the remainder of this essay I will track the non-national options for decolonization laid out by Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), an anticolonial activist and then the first president of Nigeria (1960–1966). Before turning to Azikiwe, I will survey how recent work on French West Africa has demonstrated the potential paths for decolonization beyond the nation-state. The example of Azikiwe shows that this trend was also present in British West Africa. This scholarship forcefully reminds us that decolonization into nation-states was not the only option. By helping our students understand that the world of today was never inevitable, we also help guide them toward thinking about how to change the present.

Beyond the Nation in French West Africa

     Two recent books on decolonization in the French Empire provide excellent examples of how the nation was never the inevitable outcome of decolonization. Fred Cooper and Gary Wilder's latest books should only be used in advanced undergraduate courses, but teachers of all levels can draw examples from these books to help their students see other possibilities beyond the nation. Cooper and Wilder both take seriously the ideas of African and Caribbean anticolonial thinkers who believed decolonization might take place within the French Republic rather than through independence. Cooper's book follows the career of Léopold Senghor, a French West African citizen who participated in the drafting of France's Fourth and Fifth constitutions in 1946 and 1958, advocating that France reconfigure its empire into a confederation of equal parts. Even when decolonization came on the horizon, Senghor proposed that France transfer power not to individual territories, but to large confederations of territory. Even though Senghor's efforts did not come to fruition, Cooper shows how close he and others came to achieving their vision, and highlights that the decolonization to individual states was not inevitable even up to the eve of independence in 1960.³

     Wilder also looks at Senghor but puts him alongside his fellow poet and politician, the Martinican Aimé Césaire, who also fought for a federalization of the French Empire in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Senghor, Césaire did not propose that France's Caribbean colonies become independent, but rather enter into an equal relationship where they could make demands on the metropole's financial resources. Césaire's vision of equality did not entirely come to pass either, but Martinique remains a part of the French Republic on a more equal footing than it did before 1945.⁴ Teachers might usefully pair insights about Césaire from Wilder's book with Césaire's often assigned Discourse on Colonialism.⁵ By showing students that the writer of one of the seminal anticolonial texts of the twentieth century did not support national independence for his territory, teachers will help students see the complexity of anticolonial thought, rather than simply national independence.

     However, students and instructors might rightly ask, "If these visions did not come to pass, why should we study them?" The historian of human rights Samuel Moyn has asked the same question in an essay reviewing Cooper and Wilder's works, and his question provides an opportunity to think about the value of studying "lost futures." Moyn's review, in the winter 2015 issue of Dissent, throws down a gauntlet about the relevance of researching what he calls "fantasies of federalism." For Moyn, what is important is asking why nation-states rather than federations emerged from empires, instead of trying to uncover alternatives.⁶ Moyn sees the nation-state as inevitable: "Our forebears were ultimately not inventive enough to create or even imagine a different world than one organized around nation-states."⁷

     But this is the sort of presentist thinking we want to discourage in our students: Cooper and Wilder clearly show that our forebears were certainly inventive enough to imagine a different world than one organized around nation-states, but other forces limited their ability to realize that vision. Moyn's concern about why those worlds have not come to pass is legitimate, and should form an essential part of our research and teaching, asking students and ourselves why the nation-state emerged as the main form of decolonized state. We need to understand why some people imagined the world in nation-states and why others didn't, and why in the face of so many imagining the world outside nation-states, decolonization unfolded as it did. This has been a central question about decolonization the Arab world for many years, but has been less developed in the historiography of Asian and African decolonization.⁸ Further work is coming down the pipeline bringing these historiographies into conversation by looking at anticolonialists and transfers of power in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world.⁹

     Without a scholarly consensus, though, perhaps we can bring students into the research process by asking them: why did nation-states emerge from decolonization, rather than other state forms? What groups or individuals benefited from this configuration, and which groups might have preferred other options—and why? As we consider these questions in our research and teaching, I think we will come closer to understanding the structural forces which shaped contingencies in the mid-twentieth century, leading most decolonization processes to result in independent nation-states.

     By studying and calling students' attention to alternative ideas, though, we remind them and ourselves that the current world order was not inevitable. My own research has provided another example of this, from the history of British West Africa, which I hope will provide teachers yet another example to share with their students.

Nnamdi Azikiwe beyond the Nation

     Part of my project here is to bring the line of inquiry highlighted by Cooper and Wilder in French West Africa to British West Africa in general, and in particular to a figure often overshadowed by the more often noted pan-Africanist of the region, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. Though, in fact, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Nigerian newspaper editor and eventual first president of Nigeria, had played an instrumental part in the political development of Nkrumah, guiding him and many others of his generation toward training in the United States. Azikiwe himself studied in the United States in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and while there developed his unique style of pan-Africanism which would carry him to fame in British West Africa and into a political career in its decolonization, a decolonization he foresaw not in national terms per se but on a continental scale, and in deep interconnection with the broader Black Atlantic.

     Also, I want to point us to the history of decolonization before 1945, the traditional date when we frame an "era of decolonization" for students. Too often histories, including Cooper's book, place decolonization in an intellectual and political vacuum, opening only after 1945. While from a European perspective, decolonization was only possible after 1945, anticolonialists had been thinking about decolonization and its forms for much longer. Thus, what follows is not an explanation of how Nnamdi Azikiwe tried to transcend the nation-state during Nigeria's fight for decolonization in the 1950s. Instead, I want to talk about the intellectual and political basis that launched Azikiwe into decolonization politics. I would not contend Azikiwe, or any other politician, was ever entirely consistent, but we need to think deeply about what political actors like Azikiwe were saying and writing before decolonization became politically possible. The decolonization that happened can only be explained by seeing it as a result of compromises made with earlier visions.

     Nnamdi Azikiwe was born to Igbo parents, his father a civil servant, in 1904, and proceeded to live in each of the three regions which would become Nigeria in 1914.¹⁰ Apparently from a young age Azikiwe had been intrigued by America in opposition to Britain, and aspired to study there, inspired both by an encounter with Garveyites and James Aggrey, a Gold Coast-born missionary who had himself studied in the United States.¹¹ After himself working in the Gold Coast briefly as a policeman, Azikiwe made his way to the United States in 1925, enrolling at Storer College in West Virginia, Howard University in Washington, D.C., and finally Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. While in the United States, he acquired the nickname "Zik," which he continued to use throughout his life. At Lincoln, Zik finished a bachelor's and then completed a master's at the University of Pennsylvania while teaching politics and African history at Lincoln—all while completing a manuscript on Liberia, published in 1934 as Liberia in World Politics.¹²

     Azikiwe's engagement with Liberia points to the roots of his pan-Africanism, both in the sense of recognizing the interconnection between African-Americans and the African continent and in the sense of facing up to the insufficiency of nationalism alone. His 1934 book is full of references to how Liberia is constrained by its small size, European and American imperialism, and its lack of economic self-sufficiency.¹³ Zik's Liberia is not a nation in itself, but a pan-African state meant to be "the nucleus of black hegemony," if only blacks in the Western Hemisphere and educated blacks in Africa would emigrate there, to a black sovereignty, and make its sovereignty a true one.¹⁴ Though Azikiwe's message is vague, the germ of an idea is there.

     This broader-than-nationalism would continue to develop as Azikiwe returned to West Africa (after attempting to join the foreign services of both Liberia and Ethiopia¹⁵) to take up the editorship of a new daily in Accra, the African Morning Post. While also working with the famous labor activist I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, whose "Does the African Have a God?" would get himself and Azikiwe into hot water with the British authorities, Azikiwe refined his ideas on pan-Africanism, published in 1937 as Renascent Africa.¹⁶ In this book, his most famous, Azikiwe describes how a youthful, independent, and entrepreneurial race of 'new Africans' must supplant the 'old Africa' of colonial domination and stultifying tradition. Mixing Spenglerian and Garveyite race consciousness, Fabian socialism, and nationalism, Azikiwe calls for a national risorgimento, a term whose connotations of Italian reunification could not have been lost on him. Thus, while the book speaks generally of a "new Africa" (not a terribly precise polity) and specifically of developments in British West Africa, Azikiwe does acknowledge that individual colonial societies must undergo renaissance—he claims that "the crystallization of New Africa is inevitable, but it can be realized after there have been a New Gambia, a New Sierra Leone, a New Liberia, a New Gold Coast, a New Nigeria, and a renascent social evolution in the other sections of black Africa."¹⁷ He decries territorial particularism, announcing that the nations of the world are "interdependent," and thus "our philosophy of self-preservation must be universal enough to include Africans, no matter from what part of Africa they come."¹⁸ Azikiwe lauded pan-West African initiatives, such as the National Congress of British West Africa, and at times also extended this beyond Anglophone West Africa to include French and Portuguese West Africa.¹⁹

     Yet Resurgent Africa was not a political text, or at least an outline of a political philosophy, as much as a work of cultural criticism or literary essays. It is not a program of decolonization, but it points to the framework in which Azikiwe would see decolonization once he did turn to straight politics in the 1940s: Renascent Africa does not talk about nations, but about "Africa," by which Azikiwe seems to refer to all of West Africa, or at least all of Anglophone West Africa. This would carry over once Azikiwe entered politics, first as the editor of an important Lagos newspaper, the West African Pilot after 1937, and then as part of a delegation of British West African newspaper editors to London in 1943. On the trip, Azikiwe unveiled a memorandum, entitled "The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa," supposedly composed by Azikiwe and the seven other editors from the other British West African colonies, but in all likelihood drafted by Azikiwe alone. The memo called for internal self-government for British West Africa within ten years and complete self-government—essentially Dominion Status (implying control over external affairs and defense)—within fifteen years, as the product of the entire Delegation during deliberations ongoing while they sailed from West Africa to Britain.²⁰ That is, in his first real vision for decolonization, Azikiwe called for a "British West Africa" dominion within the British Empire—not national independence.

     Azikiwe demonstrated a different form of internationalism during his first major political crisis: the Lagos general strike of 1945. After returning from Britain in 1943 without the Colonial Office replying to his memo, Azikiwe turned to more traditional politics, helping to found the National Congress of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944. While the NCNC was not explicitly pan-African except in its advocacy for the unification of the British Cameroons with Nigeria, it was pan-Nigerian, attempting to appeal beyond regional, ethnic, and religious divides within the colony to create a larger confederation—what I would call the necessary nucleus of any sort of pan-African federalism. In any case, when Azikiwe's newspapers expressed support for striking Lagos workers in June-July 1945, the colonial government shut down his flagship paper. What Azikiwe did in response is telling, because it shows not only where he saw the power to challenge colonialism, but it also demonstrates that, yet again in the case of a prominent African nationalist, there is more than the nation at play.

     After closing his newspapers, Azikiwe wrote to the Colonial Office in London to protest, but he also mobilized his international network, contacting the League of Colored Peoples and the National Council on Civil Liberties.²¹ The same day his telegram arrived in Britain, a Nigerian in England organized an ad hoc "National Committee of Africans" which telegraphed the Colonial Office and spread the word about the threat to Azikiwe.²² July 15, the day after Azikiwe's telegram, Azikiwe's old contact George Padmore's organization, the Pan-African Federation, organized a mass rally in London in support of both Azikiwe and the general strike.²³ After that, the telegrams of support poured in: together the impromptu National Committee of Africans and the Pan-African Federation succeeded in transmitting Zik's plight around the Black Atlantic and to what the Foreign Office called "the usual quarters" of protest.²⁴

     Over the next several days, cables demanding "hand off Azikiwe," following the Pan-African Federation's formulation, and for the strike came in all across the Anglophone Atlantic: from the Trinidad and Tobago Trades Union Council and Socialist Party of Trinidad and Tobago²⁵; a still-active chapter of Marcus Garvey's UNIA from Jamaica,²⁶ and a group of Garveyites in New York City²⁷; the NAACP²⁸; a group of pro-independence Indians from Washington, D.C.²⁹; the Socialist Workers Party in New York³⁰; the British Guiana Trade Union³¹; a group of about 20 Methodist ministers gathered in New York City for a missionary conference³²; the UAW³³; the Canadian League for the Advancement of Colored People³⁴; the Antigua Trades and Labour Union³⁵; and the West Indian National Congress in Barbados.³⁶

     When I found all these telegrams, I had been looking for clues to what kind of activities Azikiwe was engaged in concerning the San Francisco Conference, which founded the United Nations. But this folder, full of all these telegrams, showed me that San Francisco was not the only game in town for internationalism in summer 1945: after all, if nothing else, this folder in Kew is proof of the wartime vibrancy of what scholars have recently been describing as black internationalism.³⁷ The proximity to the San Francisco Conference provides us an opportunity to reconsider how historians have typically seen the foundation of the UN as the pinnacle of internationalism. This file at Kew shows us that, in the figurative shadows of that official narrative, an alternative form of internationalism can be found if we are willing to look for it. Mark Mazower's No Enchanted Palace usefully reminds us that the founding of the United Nations was not meant to destroy empire, but to save it, and Azikiwe and his supporters realized the same thing.³⁸ Near the end of the San Francisco Conference, where his allies had little fortune in getting West African voices heard, Azikiwe lamented, "We the unrepresented millions have sat and watched the 'power politics' of the plutocrats. An almost subconscious revival of a litany of diplomatic platitudes…have featured the discussions…We cannot help but express our disappointment."³⁹

     All of this was simply a beginning, of course: Azikiwe would go on to lead the NCNC to electoral victory in Nigeria's Eastern Region, and he would govern the Eastern Region after a partial transfer of power in 1954. Then, on independence, he would become the first African Governor-General, and then President, of Nigeria—until he was ousted in a coup in 1966, and then briefly associated with the secessionist government of Biafra. In this way, then, Azikiwe de-centers the nation in decolonization by highlighting the importance of local, regional politics—from the mechanics of partial transfers of power (as was the case in India, of course, after the Government of India Act in 1937) to the secession of regions like Biafra. But all of this represented a fall from his original position: a redemptive narrative for all of Africa, or at least all of British West Africa together, as an international personality which could be substantially independent and economically self-sufficient.

     What came after 1945 led Azikiwe and other African anticolonialists toward the decolonization we got, but that is not where they began. In that sense, their visions and ideals point toward a decolonization that might have been, which we need to take as seriously in British West Africa as in French West Africa. As Sam Moyn challenges us, we do need to explain why things didn't turn out that way. But we also need to recognize that the nation has not always been at the center of visions of decolonization and freedom, all over the colonized world. By conveying this message to our students, we will help them to think historically about how the current world order came to be, and offer them hope that the world might be different someday.

Mark L. Reeves is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is working on a dissertation comparing the interaction between anticolonial and international politics in Nigeria, the Philippines, India, and Syria. He can be reached at <mlreeves@live.unc.edu>.

¹ Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (New York: Ecco, 2007), 35–58.

² On the centrality of empires in world history, and outlines of broad swaths of history useful for teaching, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); on France as an "imperial nation-state," see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

³ Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

⁴ Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

⁵ Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

⁶ Samuel Moyn, "Fantasies of Federalism," Dissent 62, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 147: "Why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?"

⁷ Ibid., 151.

⁸ For an excellent and accessible overview of this issue in the Arab Middle East, see Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century_: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); for a longer history of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideas, see Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

⁹ Notably, my dissertation, "Lost Horizons: Anticolonial Internationalism, 1930–1970," forthcoming at the University of North Carolina, will examine the anticolonial politics of Nnamdi Azikiwe alongside statesmen from the Philippines (Carlos Romulo), India (V.K. Krishna Menon), and Syria (Shukri al-Quwwatli).

¹⁰ James Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 221; Adele E. Afigbo, "Nnamdi Azikiwe: His Cultural and Historical Roots," in Azikiwe and the African Revolution, ed. Miriam Ikejiani-Clark and Michael S. O. Olisa (Onitsha: Africana-FEP Publishers, 1989), 12; John Oriji, "Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Triumph of Knowledge," in The Igbo Intellectual Tradition: Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought, ed. Gloria Chuku (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 69.

¹¹ Gene Ulansky, "Nnamdi Azikiwe and the Myth of America" (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1980), 24–39.

¹² Oriji, "Triumph of Knowledge," 70–72; Ulansky, "Nnamdi Azikiwe and the Myth of America," 41–42, 47–51; for the influence of several notable African-American intellectuals, especially Alain Locke, on Azikiwe, see Jason C. Parker, "'Made-in-America Revolutions'? The 'Black University' and the American Role in the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic," The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 727–50; Nnamdi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (London: A.H. Stockwell, 1934).

¹³ Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics, 15–19, 66.

¹⁴ Ibid., 396.

¹⁵ Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (London: C. Hurst, 1970), 164 and 170.

¹⁶ Jonathan Derrick, Africa's "Agitators": Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 313–316; Nike L. Edun Adebiyi, "Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945–1960" (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2008), 130; Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race, and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919–1945 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 117, notes the stimulating context of the Ethiopia Crisis. Another episode from this period is examined in Ray Jenkins, "William Ofori Atta, Nnambi Azikiwe, J.B. Danquah and the 'Grilling' of W.E.F. Ward of Achimota in 1935," History in Africa 21 (January 1994): 171–89.

¹⁷ Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1937), 38.

¹⁸ Ibid., 90–91.

¹⁹ Ibid., 288.

²⁰ Nnamdi Azikiwe, "Ambassadors of Goodwill (21)," West African Pilot, November 12, 1943; "Mallam Abubakar Imam States Objections to Press Memo: Friends Disappoint Him," West African Pilot, November 9, 1943.

²¹ Nnamdi Azikiwe to Secretary of State for the Colonies Oliver Stanley, July 10, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1; Nnamdi Azikiwe to Harold Moody, n.d., attachment to Harold Moody to Oliver Stanley, July 13, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

²² Secretary, National Committee of Africans to Secretary of State for the Colonies, July 14, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1. On the ad hoc nature of the group, see Coleman, Background to Nationalism, 285.

²³ Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), 125.

²⁴ Pan-African Federation to Civil Rights Defence Committee (New York), July 16, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1. "Usual quarters" from Chancery to North American Department, Foreign Office, July 20, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

²⁵ Ralph Mentor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, July 17, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1. [connects to Richards' record as Governor of Jamaica. Misspelling and lack of emphasis on Azikiwe indicates this might not be from him directly, but still indicates how quickly this news spread across his network of activists.

²⁶ Secretary, Harmony Division, UNIA to Colonial Office, July 17, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

²⁷ A. Balfour Linton and B. Gibbons to Oliver Stanley, July 17, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

²⁸ Walter White to Oliver Stanley, July 17, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

²⁹ National Committee for India's Freedom to Colonial Office, July 18, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³⁰ James P. Cannon to Secretary of State for Colonies, July 18, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³¹ British Guiana Trade Union to Secretary of State for the Colonies, July 20, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³² Methodist ministers to Oliver Stanley, July 20, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³³ R.J. Thomas, President UAW CIO, to Oliver Stanley, July 25, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³⁴ Canadian League for the Advancement of Coloured People, Calgary, to Oliver Stanley, July 24, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³⁵ General Secretary, Antigua Trades and Labour Union, to Secretary of State for the Colonies, July 26, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³⁶ Draft telegram from Secretary of State for the Colonies to Governor of Barbados, August 4, 1945. UKNA CO 583/275/10 part 1.

³⁷ See, for example, Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Anthony Bogues, "Radical Anti-Colonial Thought, Anti-Colonial Internationalism and the Politics of Human Solidarities," in International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism, and Investigations of Global Modernity, ed. Robbie Shilliam (New York: Routledge, 2011), 197–213.

³⁸ Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), especially chs. 1–2.

³⁹ West African Pilot of June 4 and June 12, 1945, quoted in Marika Sherwood, "'There Is No New Deal for the Blackman in San Francisco': African Attempts to Influence the Founding Conference of the United Nations, April–July, 1945," The International Journal of African Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (1996): 93.