Cinquantenaire des indépendances africaines : acteurs politiques ma...

Call for Papers

Seminar: “The Fiftieth Anniversary of the African Independences: Marginalized, Forgotten, and Revived Political Actors”

23-24 Septembre 2013

The fiftieth anniversary of the African Independence has been an occasion for the East African countries and their diasporas, the international academic community and the former colonial nations to assess the economic, social and political achievements and failures of the past fifty years. However, such inventories tend to focus on the upheavals of the social, economic and political structures, sometimes on the memory of the fathers of the nation and former grand nationalistic narratives, but usually overlook political actors, whether individual or collective, which were marginalized by the men in power during the early post-independent years. These political actors, however, played a crucial role during the anticolonial struggle and in the first years following Independence. Many examples exist: in Tanzania, the educated urban Muslim traders created the first anti-colonial associations and became one of the first interlocutors of the colonial powers during the negotiations that led to independence; Swahili women and trades unions or cooperatives organized themselves to found the first political parties in the region; and many prominent political figures were eventually sidelined, such as Oscar Kambona and Abdulrahman Babu in Tanzania, or even removed or eliminated from power, like Tom Mboya and Paul Murumbi in Kenya, or Paul Mirekano in Burundi. It is essential to focus on these political actors in the light of the commemorations of Independence considering that some of them have recently been re- appropriated and sometimes even totally resuscitated: the Muslims’ participation to Tanzania’s Independence brought about the rewriting of history, and built memorials or commemorative events have increasingly flourished to revive forgotten figures, as illustrated by the case of Joseph Murumbi in Kenya.

This seminar, organized during the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Kenya’s Independence, aims at exploring these forgotten political trajectories now revived by intellectuals, politicians and the civil society. As shown for instance by the growing number of biographies recently published, the latter re-appropriate the formerly marginalized or sidelined actors and invest them with the capacity of embodying a third path during the struggle between capitalism and socialism, and even a new political morality in the current context of a crisis of political legitimacy and the demoralization of political life in Eastern Africa. Due to the resonance of their heritage and memory, these political actors of the first times of Independence constitute contemporary political languages that allow us to understand present- day political scenes in East Africa.

Kindly send your submission (a short bio and a 150-300 abstract) at seminars@ifra-nairobi.net before June 15^th 2013.