Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction De-Centering Du Bois
- 1 Rising Wind
- 2 “The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”
- 3 “An Even Larger Issue Than ‘Containing Communism’”
- 4 So Weak, So Seventeenth Century
- 5 Regime Change
- Conclusion Beyond the Single Story
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
2 - “The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”
The NAACP’s Anticolonial Struggle against South Africa, 1946–1951
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction De-Centering Du Bois
- 1 Rising Wind
- 2 “The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”
- 3 “An Even Larger Issue Than ‘Containing Communism’”
- 4 So Weak, So Seventeenth Century
- 5 Regime Change
- Conclusion Beyond the Single Story
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
No country like the Union of South Africa can be recognized as capable of exercising a colonial mandate.
– NAACP Colonial Conference, 1945The NAACP’s postwar agenda was firmly established at the April 1945 Colonial Conference. That meeting, in many ways, generated the Association’s road map to colonial liberation: South Africa (South West Africa); Italy (Libya, Eritrea, Somalia); the Netherlands (Indonesia); France (Morocco and Tunisia); and Britain (Kenya). With a strategy similar to the methodical case-by-case approach it had used to expose the sham of separate but equal, the NAACP recognized that the way each colony was governed presented a prime opportunity to strategically undermine and delegitimize the rationales that had, for too long, transformed the brutality of white supremacy into the narrative of benevolent colonial rule.
South West Africa (current day Namibia), in particular, was a testament to how far the myth of the “white man’s burden” had fallen short. The colony had been a mandate under the old League of Nations system and, as such, was a “sacred trust of civilization” administered, in this case, by South Africa. That jarring juxtaposition – a sacred trust held by a racially repressive regime – led the NAACP to emphasize two key principles that were essential for challenging the viability of colonialism in a world birthed by the Atlantic and UN Charters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bourgeois RadicalsThe NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960, pp. 69 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
, “Apartheid on Trial: South West Africa and the International Court of Justice, 1960–1966,” International History Review, 32, no. 4, (December 2010), 619–642CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17–99
, “A Test of Wills: Jimmy Carter, South Africa, and the Independence of Namibia,” Diplomatic History, 34, no. 5 (November 2010), 853–891CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Namibia and Southern Africa: Regional Dynamics of Decolonization, 1945–1990 (London; New York: Kegan Paul International, 1993)Google Scholar
, “International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP’s Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa’s Liberation, 1946-1952,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (September 2008): 297–326Google Scholar
and , eds., Words Cannot be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia, An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Boston: Brill, 2003), 62Google Scholar
, “Military Culture and the Production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelminian Germany,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, eds. and (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “International Law, Human Rights, and Namibian Independence,” Human Rights Quarterly, 8, no. 3 (August 1986), 444–445CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “South West Africa: A Study in the ‘Sacred Trust’ Thesis,” African Studies Review, 14, no. 3 (December 1971), 372–373CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 240–241Google Scholar
, “South African Territorial Expansion and the International Reaction to South African Racial Policies, 1939 to 1948,” South African Historical Journal, 50 (May 2004), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 14–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001Google Scholar
, Documents on Italian War Crimes Submitted to the United Nations War Crimes Commission by the Imperial Ethiopian Government, Vol. 1 (Addis Ababa: Ethiopian Ministry of Justice, 1949)Google Scholar
, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
, A Time to Speak (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 195
, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, foreword by , afterword by (London: Continuum Press, 2004), 64Google Scholar
, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 14–15Google Scholar
, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (New Approaches to African History), ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Modernization Theory,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., eds. and (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
, , , and , eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2003)Google Scholar
, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Google Scholar
, Years of High Purpose: From Trusteeship to Nationhood, preface by and introduction by Julius Nyerere (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980), 22Google Scholar
, “Anti-Colonialism as a Basic Indian Foreign Policy,” Western Political Quarterly, 13, no. 2 (June 1960), 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012)Google Scholar
, “The Changing Indian Diplomacy at the United Nations,” International Organization, 24, no. 1 (Winter 1970), 48–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, United Nations and the Domestic Jurisdiction of States (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979), 66–67Google Scholar
, , and , eds., Imperialism on Trial: International Oversight of Colonial Rule in Historical Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006)Google Scholar
and , The Troublemaker: A Biography of the Reverend Michael Scott (London: Aurum, 2006), 173Google Scholar
, “The Burning of Jim McIlherron: An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation,” Crisis, 16, no. 1 (May 1918), 16–20Google Scholar
, “The International League for Human Rights and South West Africa 1947–1957: The Human Rights NGO as Catalyst in the International Legal Process,” Human Rights Quarterly, 3, no. 4 (November 1981), 109–110Google Scholar
, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Ecco, 2007), 186–187Google Scholar
, “The Histories of African Americans’ Anticolonialism during the Cold War,” in The Cold War and the Third World, ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 178–191Google Scholar
, Namibia and the World: The Story of the Birth of a Nation (Delhi: Kalinga Publications, 1991), 66Google Scholar
, In Face of Fear: Michael Scott’s Challenge to South Africa (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1950), 138Google Scholar
, “Bleached Souls and Red Negroes: The NAACP and Black Communists in the Early Cold War, 1948–1952” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 93–114Google Scholar
, Brutal Mandate: A Journey to South West Africa, foreword by Mrs. (New York: MacMillan Company, 1962), 166–167Google Scholar
and Jr., “The NAACP As a Reform Movement, 1909–1965: ‘To Reach the Conscience of America,’” Journal of Southern History, 59, no. 1 (February 1993), 27Google Scholar