Decolonisation and Claim-Making in the Sudan, c.1945–1958

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Frederick Cooper and Lisa Lindsay, this article focuses on the case of Sudan, which is often marginalised in African studies. Challenging this exceptionalism, the article makes three inter-related arguments. Firstly, it demonstrates that the Sudan Government’s response to the emergence of organised labour activism in the 1940s was comparable to other colonial administrations in British Africa, as the colonial authorities sought to reshape Sudanese workers according to an idealised image of their metropolitan counterparts. Secondly, the article examines how Sudanese trade unions transformed this universalism into a ‘claim making’ device, demanding improved socio-economic entitlements in exchange for industrial stability and increased productivity. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that the claim making power of Sudanese trade unions diminished during the transition to independence as Sudanese political elites denounced labour activism in the name of nation-building – a dynamic that was observable across Africa during the period of decolonisation.

Decolonisation and ‘Development Untoward'

Kenya’s decolonisation was founded upon a contradictory and precarious strategy, menaced by the proliferation of consecutive waves of plantation strikes which revealed the unplanned formation of a rural proletariat, defying all nostrums of how a working class should emerge. There was a consensus that the brakes had to be applied to the spontaneous actions of this unwelcome actor and its further development diverted to consolidate the basis of the elite transition to independence on 2 October 1963. During the colony’s State of Emergency, declared on 20 October 1952, the imperial power attempted to violently atomise the organisation and sever the symbiotic ties of the urban proletariat. However, while being displaced from the key urban locations and pivots of the colony, these relationships stood to form elsewhere, especially in the rural presence of monopoly capital in the Kericho Valley where a rural proletariat emerged in face of attempts to reverse this process along a course of ‘peasantisation’ through land resettlement schemes.

Peter Abrahams’s Island Fictions for Freedom

When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams’s thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?

Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism

Against the backdrop of the Bauhaus centenary in 2019, Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism examined the history, significance, and future of postcolonial modernism in this region, with partners in four cities – Jakarta, Phnom Penh, Singapore, and Yangon. The project provided a historical perspective on the societal and political upheaval that accompanied the transition to independence after the colonial period in these countries. It also showcased current initiatives in the fields of art, architecture, and science that are committed to the preservation and use of Modernist buildings. In 2020, the project will continue with an exhibition and accompanying program in Berlin.