Liberation From Below

Grassroots Notions of Decolonization in Africa

Writer: Gloria Lamptey, M.A., PhD Candidate

The Moth Mentality  

As I settled into a trotro – the vibrant local bus so characteristic of Ghana – during my recent research trip, my thoughts drifted to a news article I had found in the archives, completely unrelated to my project. The opening line struck me:

“If you happen to be an adult, pass this article by quickly; it’s meant for the post-teenager and the under 25’s.”

Curiosity got the best of me. Soon, I found myself immersed in the writer's heartfelt advice aimed at guiding Ghanaian youth in the journey of choosing a life partner. I could almost picture the author in a lively discussion with young people, passionately urging them to hold their hearts close and consider their choices carefully—perhaps drawing inspiration from the allegory of the moth and the candle. The older generation had no doubt witnessed an event when a silly moth hovered over and around a flame, singeing its wings in the process and destroying itself. Who would like to have a moth mentality?  Does that mean youth should go fancy-free? By no means. All that the writer meant was for the youth to go on gingerly. But that was easier said. 

So, what can be done?

Spurred by this simple question, I found myself reflecting deeply on how my worldview has been marked by the stories I uncovered—stories of survival and hope from the now-aged Ghanaian youth who, in the 1960s, rallied behind the decolonization agenda set forth by the nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. I wondered, had they gone about their lives gingerly? Had they singed their wings? And if so, had they managed to recover? For my doctoral research, I am on a path to recover a view from the Ghanaian margins – the overlooked role of the Ghana Young Pioneers as a force of decolonization, whose wings got singed when they flew too close to the fires of political struggle. Their stories bring into perspective grassroots decolonizing agents, the people who took risks to challenge colonial legacies. Now it is the task of historians to tell their stories. 

Left: The photograph features young Ghanaian medical student Seth Atande alongside fellow students from Indonesia, Yemen, Iraq, and the former USSR. Right: A newspaper clipping of African students in the USSR in the 1960s. Both images reflect the dedication of these individuals—as well as more than 23,000 others—in pursuing a brighter future as agents of their nations [1]. 

African history has often missed various alternative forms of decolonization both within and beyond the continent. The 1960s and 1970s saw most young Africans take center stage in the dramas of decolonization, civil rights struggles, anti-war campaigns, and other protest movements sweeping across much of the world [2]. Even so, the agency of these youths and many other overlooked forms of decolonization remains constrained, or – to use a historian’s term, contingent – much like the moth drawn to the flickering flame. Grassroots actors navigate a landscape dominated by Western interests and state-centric egos. These everyday actors often find their wings singed by the very systems they sought to challenge, highlighting the inherent limitations placed on their agency within the broader decolonization discourse.

In the Black History edition of Historically Modern, I assert the importance of uncovering overlooked nodes of decolonization in African history while emphasizing the agency of the grassroots actors in a complex connection to the global world. I approach decolonization as a set of concentric circles, with local actors at the core. Local actors, in this context, are ordinary African citizens engaged in struggles to liberate themselves from the oppression in the colonial state, and, in the post-independence era. Recognizing that African identity is heterogeneous, relational, and in constant flux, the local actors I position at the center shed light on African identities who were left in the margins. Forming one of the circles, I identify historians of Africa as occupying a significant portion of the historiography, and discuss how they continuously redefined decolonization. I then move on to the historiographic challenges stemming from methodological nationalism and explain how the historian’s focus on African agency dismantled this (exclusionist) approach. Finally, I expand upon the need to articulate localist and internationalist approaches to maintain a nuanced understanding of decolonization and keep both in view.

HANDS OFF AFRICA! AFRICA MUST BE FREE! DOWN WITH COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM. An image of Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of Ghana, addressing the first All Africa People's Conference (AAPC) in Accra, Ghana, December 5-13, 1958. Behind Nkrumah in a chair is Tom Mboya (Kenya), who served as chair of the AAPC [3].

The Year of Africa

In 1960, seventeen former African colonies gained independence from colonial rule, marking what historians call the “Year of Africa.” Political leaders, as well as the citizens of the newly independent states, envisioned a new ground for unification and accelerated development. For Pan-African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sékou Touré of Guinea, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, decolonization meant cleansing the continent of every form of imperialism, domination, exploitation, and European influence. These leaders articulated an anti-imperialist and anti-racist agenda via national ideas for freedom and liberation rooted in African nationalism. Decolonization, as defined by British scholar John D. Hargreaves, was “the creation of self-governing nation-states” in the post-Second World War period [4]. This definition is exemplary of conventional histories of decolonization in Africa, which typically focus on the anti-colonial struggle of Africans from the late 1950s to the 1970s. However, decolonization is seldom restricted in application to the liberation struggles. The historiographic significance of the term is applied more broadly to various practices of resistance against colonialism, and the ongoing process of intentionally dismantling unjust practices and institutions. Over time, the scholarship shifted between the study of anticolonial struggles, African socioeconomic development, “otherness,” and knowledge production [5]. Whether pursued from a local history framework, national, regional, or global–oriented models, conventional visions of decolonization produced carefully controlled narratives that projected a heroic nationalist history.

Historiography

Decolonization in Africa is both a material and intellectual battle for self-determination. The agency of historians in Africa’s decolonization reveals significant points of change in anti-colonial scholarship, which lies at the historical intersection between academia and politics. I base this supposition on a need to explain why trained historians became swept up in anti-colonial politics. What is the significance of using historical scholarship in decolonization, and how can historical consciousness be redefined as an anti-colonial political tool? Jean Allman explains that if historians took the time to write about decolonization, it was not because they were unconcerned, even as they worked to deconstruct early African history. The anti-imperialist ideas championed by Pan-African leaders shaped the research agenda of African historians, who aimed to strip away Eurocentric biases from African epistemology. Decolonization involved questioning the processes, “constructing the theoretical and conceptual base, and setting the methodology through which the fallacious conclusions that characterized colonial historiography were derived," [6]. The first generation of African historians–“produced by colonialism and best positioned to challenge it”– were inspired by three factors: the European interpretation of Africa’s colonial history, African-authored representation in early African history, and the perspectives of educated Africans who emerged from colonial struggles [7]. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert Smith's Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century" and K. O. Dike's Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria advocated for multidisciplinary methods and the adoption of relevant but disregarded oral sources [8]. Yet, even as these nationalist historians developed decolonizing narratives, they replicated homogenous histories that flattened out the specificities of African ideals.

The African past, as recounted in the continent’s oral histories, is composed of “discrete facts, a series of heroic individuals, a collection of deep-seated social identities, and literalist concepts of traditions," [9]. In 1989, Ghanaian historian and politician Adu Boahen wrote African Perspectives on European Colonialism, calling for the “Africanization” of African colonial history by shifting the focus from “‘tribes’ to societies with cultures deserving respect in their own right," [10]. In this regard, he differed from other African elites, trained with the same European traditions and beliefs, who produced Eurocentric perspectives about Africans. These elites “extolled the beneficence of colonialism and emphasized the so-called civilizing influence of missionaries and colonialists," [11]. Nationalists consciously chose history as a vehicle for political mobilization against colonialism, precisely because it was used so successfully by nineteenth-century imperial historians to depict Africa as the ‘Other.’ Historians played an essential role in uncovering the historical roots of newly independent states, providing a foundation for their claims to legitimacy. Even as historical consciousness shaped anticolonial struggles, the ethical commitment that all human beings are entitled to moral consideration and that no one is dispensable, was the main principle that inspired many Africans dedicated to social justice and human rights to fight against colonization.

Nationalist frameworks in the study of decolonization reflect a form of explanatory reductionism, in which the emergence and development of the post-independence nation-states obfuscates the grassroots. Efforts to reclaim African history and present it from an African perspective were intimately linked to the political struggle for African independence. The African intelligentsia, Pan-African leaders and elite nationalists, garnered grassroots support, calling for unity in the fight against colonialism. They were in contradiction: motivated by a belief in pan-African unity but ultimately falling back on (and confined by) the nation as the vehicle to achieve sovereignty. As such, their narratives centered elite nationalists as heroic figures of the nation [12].  To foreground African agency, methodological nationalist approaches emerged to center elite nationalists, consequently making the nation-state the unit of analysis for understanding decolonization. It was just a matter of time before this unvoiced notion was spoken aloud, asserting a narrative defined by ‘methodological nationalism,’ the idea of the nation-state as “the standard, optimal, or even maximum isolate” for analysis, imposing national boundaries as the terminal unit for the study of social issues [13]. When scholars adopt a nation-centric approach, they risk conflating identity with culture, which leads them to lose sight of the nation-state as a partial perspective and see it instead as truth. When historians fail to look beyond the nation-state lens, they import bias into the study of Africa’s decolonization, often smuggling in narratives of heroic national leadership [14]. ‘Sub’- nationalisms challenged the nation-state and the sanctity of its colonial borders [15].

Ghana troops attached to the UN forces debark in Congo. Accessed at the Institute of African Studies Library and Archives, January 21, 2025. 

Grassroots

Anti-colonial nationalisms were not only elite ideologies but mass movements that sought to overcome the layered structures of colonial domination [16]. In the preface of one of the most provocative of the earliest, critical studies of decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “there is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power,” [17]. Decolonization, almost by definition, has always had a political charge – one that was often marred by violence and organized revolts against colonial domination. The scholarship of the 1990s brought women, workers, and peasants into the frame of decolonization [18]. These histories show that nationalist scripts often written from above were, in reality, acted from below. This significantly broadened the category of intellectuals to include local actors such as traditional rulers and chiefs and other ordinary Africans who understood the need for freedom, experienced colonial brutalities and inequalities, and joined forces in the anti-colonial struggle [19]. The relationship between peasants as historical actors rejects Eurocentric and elitist views that dismiss peasants as intellectuals in non-literate societies. Officials at the royal court, clerks, chiefs, and peasant teachers organized political movements and mediated between practical and discursive knowledge, local society, and the wider world [20]. Locally informed analyses of decolonization reflect how grassroots notions of autonomy cohered with national ideas for self-determination. Reconstructing the histories of decolonization requires analysis of the realities of African actors themselves, irrespective of their place within narratives of national becoming. This is because the social movements of common people reflect the internal dynamics that sustain African societies.

To understand the nature of decolonization and its varying effects on African societies, it is necessary to ask, not only ‘why?’ but also ‘how?’, ‘when?’, and ‘by whom?’ Historian Frederick Cooper calls for a greater appreciation of the range of political alternatives and non-territorial projects. In response, studies have emerged to shed light on the power dynamics between global and local trajectories [21]. Recent interests focus on the re-examination of alternative decolonization paths, such as the transnational histories of freedom fighters and Pan-African youth in decolonization, that earlier scholarship did not consider. Historians are paying greater attention to ongoing postcolonial traumas, particularly cultural and intellectual forms. For example, Gregory Mann examines the status of veterans in modern Malian society and their efforts to claim recognition and seek “reparations” for their sacrifices as African soldiers in French wars [22]. Mann’s analysis shows that the traumas and public memory of veterans in Africa serve to prove the enormous contributions former colonies made to the metropole and to justify their claim for reparations. These past injustices continue to animate lively discussion on the fraught relationship between France and its former African colonies, particularly in ways that shape the political belonging of West African immigrants in France and of the veterans back home in Africa. The transnational turn in African history sheds light on the diverse African perspectives and connections within and beyond Africa that have been overlooked; it reveals the limits of a triumphal nationalist history that cannot otherwise be seen beyond the borders of the nation-state. Transnational history can be seen as a manifestation of comparative, international, world, and global history. Although each of these approaches is distinct, they all are characterized by a desire to break out of the nation-state as the primary category of analysis.

Conclusion

Since the twenty-first century’s transnational turn, historians studying Africa's decolonization have grappled with the intricate task of harmonizing local, transregional, and global perspectives. Decolonization was a vehicle to demand equality on a global scale. Independence aimed to advance global equity by challenging the unequal power dynamics inherent in colonial and postcolonial relations between African and European powers. A critical examination of the (arguable) failures of postcolonial states necessitates a reassessment of independence and its shortcomings. In this regard, the relationship between global actors (former colonizers, international institutions, international relations), regional actors (inter-African relations), nation-states (political institutions), and local actors (grassroots and minority groups) are deeply intertwined.  However, while scholars adopting broad frameworks choose to integrate local perspectives, local history scholars must navigate whether to engage in dialogue with these grander frameworks that may not consistently encompass their significance within the historiography. Local society should not be reduced into a single unit of analysis or be turned into little more than examples to validate general principles or to demonstrate transformations in the wider world [23]. Drawing on local actors at the core of regional and global analysis, African epistemologies not only emphasize African voices but also the African self or being, the ways in which African actors continuously define themselves. The main question of decolonization scholarship is: whom does it serve, and what (or whom) does it center? If the focus on Africa’s decolonization does not prioritize African agency, it cannot advance decolonial goals. As Gerawork Teffera, an African researcher and teacher in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya suggests, research on people whose identity and positionality have been shaped for decades by exclusion, alienation, domination, and exploitation should focus on the trees rather than the forest. Teffera’s approach to studying forced migration privileges first-hand testimonial accounts of displaced individuals. By compiling these unique stories, this method enables him to show how refuge-seeking is unstructured and far more complex than the simplified categories used in UNHCR policies [24]. Researchers can adopt a similar approach to derive a clearer understanding of the agency of local actors in the decolonization of African societies. At the same time, researchers must keep the existence of international structures in mind to critically approach concepts like nation, gender, ethnicity, and race in Africa’s decolonization history in harmonizing the significance of local, transnational/regional, and global perspectives.

In conclusion, postcolonial states of the twentieth century inherited much beyond their geographical boundaries from the European colonizers. Elite consciousness bore the marks of colonial educational and administrative journeys, whose legacies continued to influence thinking in the Post-Independence Era. Colonial influences on the global stage continue to shape perspectives in decolonization historiography and the ideologies of current political systems. Even so, the call to decolonize today, in the sense that Fanon understood decolonization, is a process, not an event, and one of such world-historical significance that inequalities of all kinds be called into question. Historical thinking in decolonization scholarship has contributed to changing the metanarratives and methodology that now apply to decolonial studies. The African revolution that Kwame Nkrumah imagined would forge new national histories and identities saw the commitment of historians to make Africans ‘lead actors’ in a ‘European tale.’ Instead of dismantling and recreating something new, decolonization is, in many instances, a fight for a prominent seat in an imperial-dominated space. There is a need to deconstruct this form of decolonization. Scholars must examine diverse forms of Euro-American policies that undermine African values, the aim of which is not to project a heroic nationalist history. A primary goal of decolonization is to center the African self - the identities, cultures, and lived realities of those who are themselves historical actors and the ways they assert their agency in African history. When positioned at the core of the African web, histories of the grassroots - the moths whose wings got singed by the fires of decolonization - can draw overlooked nodes of decolonization from the margins, able to travel in different directions, connecting the local to the global.

Endnotes

[1] HU OSA 300-80-956; @1964 RFE/RL Research Institute; Soviet Red Archives, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute; Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest, June, 2024.

[2] Andrew Ivaska, “Decolonizing Refugees: Exile and Political Possibility in 1960s Dar es Salaam” Stateless Histories, 2022.

[3] Southern Africa Committee photo archive collection; All African People Conference, Ghana December 1958. Accessed at African Archivist  https://africanactivist.msu.edu/browse/results/?collection=Southern+Africa+Committee+photo+archive 

[4] John D Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa. (Routledge, 1996), 244

[5] See; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981); M. V. Y. Mudimbe, “Discourse of Power and Knowledge of Otherness,” in The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 14–36.

[6] Toyin Falola, Decolonizing African Studies: Knowledge Production, Agency, and Voice (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2022).

[7] James S. Coleman, Nationalism and Development in Africa: Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Jean Allman, “Between the Present and History: African Nationalism and Decolonization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, ed. John Parker and Richard Reid (Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199572472.013.0012.  

[8] Kenneth O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1956; J. F. Ade Ajayi, Robert Sydney Smith, and University of Ibadan. Institute Of African Studies, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge [England] Cambridge University Press, In Association with The Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1971).

[9] Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Oxford: J. Currey, 1997).

[10] Adu Boahen, “A New Look at the History of Ghana,” African Affairs 65, no. 260 (July 1966): 212–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a095515.

[11] Joseph K. Adjaye, “Perspectives on Fifty Years of Ghanaian Historiography,” History in Africa 35 (January 2008): 5.

[12] Ali Mazrui Africa's International Relations: The Diplomacy of Dependency and Change (London: Heinemann, 1977). 

[13] See H. Martins, “Time and Theory in Sociology,” in Approaches to Sociology, ed. J Rex (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974): 276.

[14] See George Vasilev, “Methodological Nationalism and the Politics of History-Writing: How Imaginary Scholarship Perpetuates the Nation,” Nations and Nationalism 25, no. 2 (June 5, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12432.

[15] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 3

[16] Elie, Kedourie, Nationalism. [2d ed.]. (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1961). 

[17] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (S.L.: Grove, 1961), 21

[18] For women’s role in Africa’s decolonization see, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

[19] Steven, Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

[20] See; Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, 13

[21] Fredrick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. (Cambridge University Press; 2002).

[22] See; Gregory Mann, Native Sons (Duke University Press, 2006).

[23] Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals.

[24] Gerawork Teferra, “Fostering Education Services in Kakuma Refugee Camp,” in The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers, ed. Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023), 47–75.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

HU OSA 300-80-956; @1964 RFE/RL Research Institute; Soviet Red Archives, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute; Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest, June 2024

Southern Africa Committee photo archive collection; All African People Conference, Ghana December 1958. Accessed at African Archivist  https://africanactivist.msu.edu/browse/results/?collection=Southern+Africa+Committee+photo+archive

Daily Graphic, 1961. “Ghana troops attached to the UN forces debark in Congo”. Accessed at the Institute of African Studies Library and Archives, January 21, 2025. 

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