Abstract

Far from being a salacious footnote in the history of anticolonial nationalist struggles, the roles that white women played in the push towards African independence—as political comrades, friends, and sometimes as lovers or wives to many of the black men who had come to the imperial center to agitate and prepare for independence—were often sustained and meaningful. This article revisits this history—as told in the pages of my book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana—in order to offer a critique of the skewed gendered optics of African nationalism produced by the book’s focus on interracial relationships. Although novel in its analysis of the affective interracial bonds that helped nourish the work of African nationalism in the colonial metropole, the lens of interracial intimacy deployed in Crossing the Color Line keeps African women at the margins of the nationalist narrative, where they have long been relegated despite decades of stellar research on their key roles in mass nationalist movements. In seeking a way out of this conundrum, this article concludes with a call for an affective history of African nationalism that centers intimacies and other forms of solidarity between African men and women as a means of advancing an integrative approach to nationalism that explores it as a shared project between African men and women rather than a history to which African women must be restored. In so doing this article offers a new model of the review essay for the Journal of West African History, one that invites authors to engage in critical reappraisals of their own published work. What do we learn after the fact of publication about both the contributions and consequences of our research? How can we engage those issues in ways that move beyond purely backwards looking reflection to hale new research agendas?

Résumé

Loin d’être une note de bas de page salace dans l’histoire des luttes nationalistes anticoloniales, les rôles que les femmes blanches ont joué dans la quête de l’indépendance africaine - en tant que camarades politiques, amies et parfois en tant qu’amantes ou épouses de nombreux hommes noirs venus au centre impérial pour manifester et préparer à l’indépendance - étaient souvent prolongés et significatifs. Cet article revient sur cette histoire - comme indiqué dans les pages de mon livre, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana - afin de présenter une critique de l’optique sexiste biaisée du nationalisme africain produite par le livre, qui se focalise sur les relations interraciales. Bien que novateur dans son analyse des liens interraciaux affectifs qui ont permis de nourrir le travail du nationalisme africain dans la métropole coloniale, le prisme de l’intimité interraciale déployé dans Crossing the Colour Line maintient les femmes africaines en marge du récit nationaliste, où elles ont reléguées malgré des décennies de recherches remarquables mettant en valeur leurs rôles clés dans les mouvements nationalistes de masse. Dans le but de sortir de cette problématique, cet article se termine en faisant appel à une histoire affective du nationalisme africain centrée sur l’intimité et d’autres formes de solidarité entre hommes et femmes africains comme moyen de faire progresser une approche intégrative du nationalisme, et exploré comme un projet partagé entre hommes et femmes africains, plutôt qu’une histoire à laquelle les femmes africaines doivent être restaurées. Nous proposons ainsi un nouveau modèle d’essai critique pour le Journal of West African History, qui invite les auteurs à procéder à une réévaluation critique de leurs propres ouvrages. Que pouvons-nous apprendre de nos ouvrages et des conséquences de nos recherches après leur publication ? Comment pouvons-nous aborder ces questions d’une manière qui dépasse le cadre de la rétrospection et élabore de nouveaux programmes de recherche?

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Notes

1. Hilde Marchant, “Africa Speaks in Manchester,” Picture Post, November 10, 1945, 19; emphasis added.
2. Mark Sealy, “Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time” (Ph.D. diss., Durham University, 2016), 132–33, 141–43. It should be noted that in 1900 there was a Pan-African Conference in London, which was followed in 1919 by the first Pan-African Congress in Paris. So technically the Manchester Congress marked the sixth meeting, but the fifth Congress.
3. Ibid., 136.
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103.
5. Sealy, “Decolonizing the Camera,” 136.
6. Less obvious, but nonetheless compelling are the ways that Foucault’s observation is also born out in the rhetorically powerful political uses to which colonized subjects put their own grievances about interracial sex—especially between white men and indigenous women—to foment anticolonial resistance. Elsbeth Locher-Scholten writing on Indonesia, Benjamin Madley on Namibia, Jennifer Cole on Madagascar, and Lisa Lindsay on Nigeria, as well as early anticolonial theorists, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, have all traced the generative connections between the domain of interracial sex and the rise of anticolonial nationalism across Asia, Africa, and beyond. Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “Morals, Harmony, and National Identity: ‘Companionate Feminism’ in Colonial Indonesia in the 1930s,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003): 47; Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 2 (2004): 183–85; Herik Lundtofte, “’I believe that the nation as such must be annihilated… .’: The Radicalization of the German Suppression of the Herero Rising in 1904,” in Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates, ed. Steven L. B. Jensen (Copenhagen, Denmark: Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003), 27; Jennifer Cole, Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 102; Lisa Lindsay, “A Tragic Romance, a Nationalist Symbol: The Case of the Murdered White Lover in Colonial Nigeria,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005): 132; Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952) and Albert Memmi, Agar (Paris: Éditions Corréa, 1955); Portrait du colonisé, précédé par Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1957); L’Homme dominé (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968). For a critical reading of the sexual politics of Fanon’s anticolonial prose see Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007): 76–103. For a treatment of Memmi’s problematic regard for Fanon see Charles F. Peterson, Dubois, Fanon, Cabral: The Margins of Elite Anti-Colonial Leadership (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007): 95–97. I have also explored this link in my own work: Carina Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 78–110; “’White Peril’/Black Power: Interracial Sex and the Beginning of the End of Empire,” in Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015).
7. Marchant, “Africa Speaks in Manchester,” 20.
8. Sealy, “Decolonizing the Camera,” 139.
9. Marchant, “Africa Speaks in Manchester,” 19.
10. Sealy, “Decolonizing the Camera,” 135–36.
11. Marchant, “Africa Speaks in Manchester,” 20.
12. Marc Matera notes, for instance, that the black population in London remained overwhelming male until the late 1950s. In France during the interwar years women made up only two percent of the African population. This number only rose significantly in the decades after independence. Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 19; J. A. Boittin, “Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic,” French Politics, Culture and Society 27, no. 2 (2009): 25.
13. Matera, Black London, 100.
14. Marc Matera, “Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919–1950” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2008), 166.
15. Marika Sherwood, “Kwame Nkrumah: The London Years, 1945–47” in Africans in Britain, ed. David Killingray (London: Cass, 1994), 181–82. For Nkrumah’s account of his time at the Manchester Congress, which studiously avoids any mention of his white girlfriend, see Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957), 53–55. For an analysis of the ways in which Nkrumah’s autobiography elides many of the signififcant affective relationships he had with women, see Phillip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 137–39.
16. On the rise of the dance hall in twentieth-century Britain, its intersection with youth culture, and its particularly vexed relationship with race see James Nott, Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
17. Jeff Ramsay, “Ruth Khama: A Life of Service,” Botswana Notes and Records 34, no. 1 (2003): 135.
18. Barbara Bush, “Blacks in Britain: The 1930s,” History Today 31, no. 9 (1981): 47. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the French context, there were striking parallels. See Jennifer A. Boittin, “Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic,” French Politics, Culture and Society 27, no. 2 (2009): 23–46; Jennifer A. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Also see Tyler Stovall, “Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War,” in French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, ed. Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 297–321.
19. Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 80.
20. Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 178.
21. Joe Appiah, Joe Appiah: The Autobiography of an African Patriot (New York: Praeger, 1990), 192–93.
22. Among the prominent African independence leaders who married or otherwise had significant relationships with white women are Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Senegal’s Leopold Senghor, Angola’s Agostino Neto, Botswana’s Seretse Khama, Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Malawi’s Hastings Banda. At independence Senghor’s, Neto’s, and Khama’s white wives all became inaugural first ladies.
23. Boittin, “Black in France,” 34.
24. Matera, Black London, 236.
25. Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, 137–38.
26. Quoted in Matera, “Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919–1950,” 248.
27. Phillip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, 137–38. The letter itself can be found in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, CO 964/24, Watson Commission—Gold Coast Commission of Enquiry, Exhibits, vol. 1, exhibit 46.
28. Matera, Black London, 236.
29. Nkrumah, Ghana, 56. Phillip Holden suggests that Nkrumah’s “close relationships with the women working [at] the West African National Secretariat in London are hidden completely” from his autobiography, however the passage cited above offers a glimpse into the affective realm of the WANS office even if anonymized by Nkrumah’s language. Philip Holden, “Imagined Individuals: National Autobiography and Postcolonial Self-Fashioning,” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, no. 13 (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2003), 11.
30. Nkrumah, Ghana, 56. For more on the denigration of white British women involved in interracial relationships see Laura Tabili, “Women ‘of a Very Low Type’: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Late Imperial Britain,” in Laura Frader and Sonya Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 165–190.
31. Ibid., 56–67.
32. Appiah, Joe Appiah, 154–55.
33. Ibid., 155.
34. Matera, “Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919–1950,” 40. Also see Matera, Black London, 117–18.
35. Nkrumah, Ghana, 109. Also see Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 135. For more on the role of women in the CPP see Takyiwaa Manu, “Women and Their Organizations during the Convention People’s Party Period” in The Ghana Reader, ed. Kwasi Konadu and Clifford Campbell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 285–91.
36. George Padmore, The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom (London: Dennis Dobson, 1953), 115.
37. Although Amy Ashwood Garvey’s participation in the Congress was obscured in the pages of the Picture Post article, her seat on the dais, according to Ula Taylor, was in fact originally intended for Amy Jacques Garvey, who had been one of the Congress’s organizers but was ultimately unable to attend due to a lack of travel funds, which points to unequal access to funding as an additional factor that furthered Black women’s political marginalization. Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 171–73.
38. Susan Geiger, “Women and African Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (1990): 227.
39. Ibid., 228.
40. Ibid. Geiger rightly points out that in its great attention to the role that African women played in the 1947 Dakar-Niger Railway Strike, which was a prelude to independence, Ousmane Semebene’s Gods Bits of Wood (New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1962) stands out as one of “the first direct challenges to African nationalist histories devoid of women participants” (229). To this I would add that it remains one of the few works produced by a man that centers African women in nationalist movements. In the context of this article, Gods Bits of Wood is also significant because of its attention to the affective bonds between African men and women in the context of nationalist struggle.
41. See Geiger, “African Women and Nationalism” for relevant work produced prior to 1990, when Geiger’s article was published. Newer work includes but is not limited to: Meredith Terretta, Petitioning for Our Rights, Fighting for Our Nation: The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949–1960 (Oxford: African Books Collective, 2013); Abosede George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Alicia Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Judith Byfield, The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). Jean Allman’s edited collection Fashioning Africa: Power and Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) uses the lens of dress to explore a range of issues related to gender and nationalism. It includes a number of contributions that look at the nexus between women, dress, and nationalism; see especially Allman, “‘Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume’: Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Clothing in Nkrumah’s Ghana.” The historical literature on the role of African women in nationalist movements is complemented by an increasingly robust body of work that explores black diasporic women’s internationalism and anticolonial activism. Relevant work includes: Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Carol Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University, Press, 2013); Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Imaobong Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
42. Jean Allman, “The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 3 (2009): 13–35. On the restricted participation of women in anticolonial movements and their marginalization in the subsequent historiography of those movements in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as an attempt to correct these omissions, see Robert J. C. Young, “Women, Gender and Anti-colonialism,” in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 360–82. Also see Joyce M. Chadya, “Mother Politics: Anti-Colonial Nationalism and the Woman Question in Africa,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (2003): 153–57.
43. Matera, Black London; Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (London: Oxford University Press, 2016).
44. Aidan Southall, “The Contribution of Anthropology to African Studies,” African Studies Review 26, nos. 3/4 (1983): 63–76.
45. Oren Kroll-Zeldin, “Colonialism,” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology (2016), https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567–0139.xml. For more on the development of and developments in critical anthropology, see George Stocking Jr., ed., Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); George Marcus, ed., Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1999); and Stephen Nugent, ed., Critical Anthropology: Foundational Works (New York: Routledge, 2016). For an overview of Africanist historians’ critical engagement with anthropology, including the emergence of historical anthropology, see Constance Smith, “Anthropological and Ethnographic Methods and Sources” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, (2017), https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-244.
46. Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
47. Jennifer Cole, Sex and Salvation.
48. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 14.
49. Pernille Ipsen, Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
50. Kathryn de Luna, “Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 123–50; Megan Vaughan, “The History of Romantic Love in Sub-Saharan Africa: Between Interest and Emotion,” Proceedings of the British Academy 167 (2010): 1–23.
51. Vaughan, “The History of Romantic Love in Sub-Saharan Africa,” 10.
52. For Shinqiti poets see Isidore Okpewho, “The Study of African Oral Literature,” Presence Africaine, no. 139 (1986): 32. Vaughan reviews relevant work on Copperbelt song lyrics, Onitsha pamphlet literature, and advice columns that appeared in a variety of African newspapers in, “The History of Romantic Love in Sub-Saharan Africa” 18–20. For more on pamphlet and paperback popular fiction concerning questions of love, romance, and other themes in Ghana, see Stephanie Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction: “Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life” and Other Tales (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001). Aissata Sidikou and Thomas Hale draw attention to song as a vehicle that Sahelian women used to express a range of emotions related to love, whether desire, loss, or jealousy in their edited volume Women’s Voices from West Africa: An Anthology of Songs from the Sahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Some of the greatest African novels explore the question of love, including Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes: A Love Story (New York: Feminist Press, 1993); Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter (Dakar, Senegal: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines du Sénégal, 1979); Buchi Emecheta, The Bride Price (London: Allison & Busby, 1975); and Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1963).
53. Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). I wish to thank Jean Allman for bringing my attention to this text.
54. Nkrumah, Ghana, 14.
55. Horvat, The Radicality of Love, 22.
56. Gamal Nkrumah, “Fathia Nkrumah: Farewell to all that,” Al-Ahram Weekly, September 14–20, 2000, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2000/499/profile.htm.
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