In August 1952, students at Makerere University College, Kampala, went on strike. Chapter 1 connects the strike – and its leader Abu Mayanja – to the regional crises of 1952–1953: the Mau Mau uprising and the imposition of the Central African Federation. Education institutions and party politics came into unprecedented dialogue in this period, but this process was not directed from above by an older generation of nationalist leaders. Secondary school graduates, college students and newly qualified schoolteachers all encouraged this shift as they sought to define a global role for this regional cohort, thinking through regional comparisons, historical crossroads and notions of constitutional protest. Returning repeatedly to Makerere, this chapter focuses on correspondence around the strike, networks of schoolteachers, party-political student clubs, student publishing and anti-Federation newsletters. These examples demonstrate the importance of regional structures – and of how young people responded to these structures – as they set their sights on anticolonial work beyond the region.

This short conclusion pulls together the implications of tracing this cohort’s work and thought, through the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, for our understanding of the social and intellectual processes that accompanied legal-constitutional decolonisation. It focuses on the broader and less state-centric picture that emerges, on the importance of a regional framework to arrive at this ‘distributed’ history, and on the merits of microhistorical methods for revising heroic narratives of both national liberation and global solidarity projects. A new intellectual history of anticolonialism could thus make more room for social histories and collective labour.

In a flurry of activity that peaked in the late 1950s, a cohort of activists from the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania participated in a global landscape of anticolonial activism. They travelled to hubs like Delhi, London, Cairo and Accra, navigating Cold War internationalisms as students, exiles and political representatives. They formed committees, manned offices, published pamphlets, launched newsletters and corresponded with international organisations. And yet, often, their committees collapsed, they struggled with stationery shortages, their pamphlet manuscripts were rejected, their newsletters were prevented from reaching readers and they were let down by organisations. The introduction asks how to understand this story against a historiographical backdrop that narrates global anticolonialism through the violent hotspots of international decolonisation. It proposes a microspatial perspective and the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, arguing that this regional cohort, by some measures marginal, can help us understand the limits of transnational activism in the unfolding of decolonisation.

In September 1961, Munu Sipalo circulated a conspiracy pamphlet at the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade. Chapter 5 thinks through the motif of conspiracy to ask how this cohort responded to the challenges of the global Cold War, particularly in the context of the Congo Crisis of 1960–1961. Congo had a particular resonance for this regional cohort, laying bare the high stakes of ‘nominal’ political independence in a time of Cold War neo-colonialism. In London, the Committee of African Organisations commented on the unfolding crisis and its implications for decolonising knowledge production, as Chango Machyo and Dennis Phombeah launched pamphlet ventures in the aftermath of an All-African Students Conference. For many in this cohort, engagement with the contours of the Cold War happened through youth and student internationals. Samuel Kajunjumele attended the 1959 Vienna World Youth Festival with the International Union of Socialist Youth at a pivotal moment: just as these organisations increased their contacts in the region, the uncertainty of independence negotiations made students abroad appear a liability – in notable contrast to the early 1950s.

In 1962, Sikota Wina wrote a report on the United National Independence Party (UNIP) International Publicity Bureau, which had just opened an office in Dar es Salaam, capital of newly independent Tanganyika and liberation hub in the making. Chapter 6 asks how the anticolonial culture of this cohort fell away over the course of the staggered independence dates of Tanganyika, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Accra, having just begun to host liberation movements from around 1960, appeared unable to provide a platform for activists after Munu Sipalo’s stint on the editorial board of Voice of Africa. Cairo lost much of the appeal it held in John Kale’s heyday, as conflict over the legitimacy of political parties paralleled a crisis in office resources. Lobbying groups on the Western European Left grew irrelevant in a new funding landscape that came with the timetabling of statehood, while PAFMECA soon dissolved. The acceleration of independence negotiations in the region was ambivalent: this chapter closes by arriving in Dar es Salaam by way of radio broadcasting and technical training for Zambian secretaries – whose experience was not only one of anticolonial regional solidarity.

The late 1950s saw a certain internationalisation of anticolonial campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the independence of Sudan and Ghana in 1955–1958. Chapter 3 asks how this cohort pursued strategies to hold newly independent states accountable to promises of anticolonial patronage, in the lead up to the famous All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in December 1958 in Accra. This chapter visits five moments obscured in the AAPC’s shadows: Munu Sipalo’s attendance at the Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay; John Kale’s publishing from his Cairo office; the first Pan-African Students Conference at Makerere; Abu Mayanja’s founding of the Committee of African Organisations in London; Kanyama Chiume’s role in the formation of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa at Mwanza. Activists continued to think through a regional-generational lens: their activities highlight previously unexplored tensions in the Afro-Asian and pan-African movement and recast factions in the nationalist parties of these four countries. The AAPC was never simply a galvanising force for East and Central African activists.

In mid-1953, Abu Mayanja and Munu Sipalo left to study in Britain and India respectively. Chapter 2 follows them to explain the growing importance of information circulation in this cohort’s anticolonial culture. The opportunities they found for pursuing anticolonial activism in the urban hubs of London and Delhi need to be understood within the framework of the early 1950s (anti-communist) socialist internationalism in Western Europe and newly independent Asian countries, specifically through the Socialist International and Asian Socialist Conference. Young, mobile East and Central Africans were critical to the visions of these organisations and the networks that linked them. But Sipalo’s attempts to run an Africa Bureau and organise a pan-African conference, and Mayanja’s attempts to find a platform in the British press were constrained by experiences of racism, and by the ignorance and skewed priorities of anticolonial sympathisers and patrons. Mayanja’s trip to a Moral Re-Armament ‘multiracial’ spiritual centre in the Swiss Alps epitomised some of the paradoxes of this cohort’s information campaign. Much of this is lost when reading this as a history of students abroad.

In early 1959, Kanyama Chiume escaped arrest during the Nyasaland Emergency. Chapter 4 follows him in his period of exile, focusing on two pamphlets he wrote in London. These pamphlets provide a way to assess the limits of the newly internationalised global anticolonial world of the late 1950s for this regional-generational cohort. These activists honed their vision of publicity and of the party publicity officer by drawing on the regional specificities of the late colonial state in East and Central Africa. Gender and form were of critical importance to this vision. This cohort joined the conversation around colonial violence in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, discussing ideas about permits, police and imprisonment in and beyond the region, in correspondence, conferences and publications. Charting the development of their ideas about totalitarianism at this apparent turning point helps to explain why the UN was largely out of reach, why activists continued to formulate their critiques in terms that echoed the early 1950s and why they increasingly doubted the efficacy and legitimacy of world public opinion.