Origins Of West African Nationalism

The study o f African history as an academic discipline is a rather new field and one that still has its detractors both w ithin and outside academics. This collection o f articles highlights for students and scholars the modern era in African history. It brings together published research on the colonial era in Africa, an era relatively brief but one that saw dramatic change in African societies.

Convinced by her sister in their childhood that buying seven boxes of macaroni daily will prevent bad luck, Minnie, now grown up, is not pleased to find out her sister was only fooling.

African Nationalism offers an innovative perspective on the creation of nations and nationalism, and the role of race in nationalism overall, by bringing together a compilation of debates on African nationalism, from Pan-Africanism up to the present day. The book examines African nationalism in comparative perspective, mainly with the UK, France, and the US: the birthplaces of modern nationalism. The author suggests that the origins of African nationalism lay outside the continent and demonstrates the similarities that abound between African nationalisms across a diverse range of countries. This volume is important reading for students and scholars of nationalism, history, political science, and African studies.

An examination of the attempt by Western-educated African intellectuals to create a 'better Africa' through connecting nationalism to knowledge, from the anti-colonial movement to the present-day. This book is about how African intellectuals, influenced primarily by nationalism, have addressed the inter-related issues of power, identity politics, self-assertion and autonomy for themselves and their continent, from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Their major goal was to create a 'better Africa' by connecting nationalism to knowledge. The results have been mixed, from the glorious euphoria of the success of anti-colonial movements to the depressingcircumstances of the African condition as we enter a new millennium. As the intellectual elite is a creation of the Western formal school system, the ideas it generated are also connected to the larger world of scholarship.This world is, in turn, shaped by European contacts with Africa from the fifteenth century onward, the politics of the Cold War, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In essence, Africa and its elite cannot be fully understood without also considering the West and changing global politics. Neither can the academic and media contributions by non-Africans be ignored, as these also affect the ways that Africans think about themselves and their continent. Nationalism and African Intellectuals examines intellectuals' ambivalent relationships with the colonial apparatus and subsequent nation-state formations; the contradictions manifested within pan-Africanism and nationalism; and the relation of academic institutions and intellectual production to the state during the nationalism period and beyond. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.