African Independence highlights the important role Africa has played in recent history and the significant role it will continue to play in the future of America and the globe. In a world where much of the power and wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a very few people, this book looks at how the history of African independence has touched all people—from refugees to heads of state. Author Tukufu Zuberi weaves exclusive interview excerpts and stories from many Africans he has met with old newsreels, current news and reports, and research into a larger narrative that takes readers through key events in African history and shows their importance today. The book provides context for understanding connections between events in Africa and the world, such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram acts of war against the citizens of Nigeria and neighboring states, China’s rise as the main superpower with the largest financial connections to the African continent, and the so-called war against terrorism. Zuberi is also the director of the documentary African Independence, which has won awards including Best Director and Best Documentary at the San Diego Black Film Festival, Best Director at The People’s Film Festival, Best African Film at the San Diego Black Film Festival, and more. Both alone and together, the book and film offer a deeper understanding of Africa’s central role in world affairs.

'Meredith has given a spectacularly clear view of the African political jungle' – Spectator 'This book is hard to beat... Elegantly written as well as unerringly accurate' – Financial Times The fortunes of Africa have changed dramatically since the independence era began in 1957. As Europe’s colonial powers withdrew, dozens of new states were born. Africa was a continent rich in mineral resources and its economic potential was immense. Yet, it soon struggled with corruption, violence and warfare, with few states managing to escape the downward spiral. So what went wrong? In this riveting and authoritative account, Martin Meredith examines the myriad problems that Africa has faced, focusing upon key personalities, events and themes of the independence era. He brings his compelling analysis into the modern day, exploring Africa’s enduring struggles for democracy and the rising influence of China. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the continent’s plight and its hopes for a brighter future.

A truly satisfactory history of Rhodesia, one that takes into account both the African history and that of the whites, has never been written. That is, until now. In this book Luise White highlights the crucial tension between Rhodesia as it imagined itself and Rhodesia as it was imagined outside the country. Using official documents, novels, memoirs, and conversations with participants in the events taking place between 1965, when Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain, and 1980 when indigenous African rule was established through the creation of the state of Zimbabwe, White reveals that Rhodesians represented their state as a kind of utopian place where white people dared to stand up for themselves and did what needed to be done. It was imagined to be a place vastly better than the decolonized dystopias to its north. In all these representations, race trumped all else including any notion of nation. Outside Rhodesia, on the other hand, it was considered a white supremacist utopia, a country that had taken its own independence rather than let white people live under black rule. Even as Rhodesia edged toward majority rule to end international sanctions and a protracted guerilla war, racialized notions of citizenship persisted. One man, one vote, became the natural logic of decolonization of this illegally independent minority-ruled renegade state. Voter qualification with its minutia of which income was equivalent to how many years of schooling, and how African incomes or years of schooling could be rendered equivalent to whites, illustrated the core of ideas about, and experiences of, racial domination. White s account of the politics of decolonization in this unprecedented historical situation reveals much about the general processes occurring elsewhere on the African continent."

'A superb book...genuinely innovative' Jack Spence OBE, King's College London Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems but also progress and the perpetual interplay of structure and agency. This new view of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex and sometimes confusing development of an independent Africa. The story starts well before the granting of independence to Ghana in 1957, but the book also looks at Africa in the closing decades of the old millennium and opening ones of the new. This is a book, too, about the history of the peoples of Africa and their struggle for economic development against the global economic straitjacket into which they were strapped by colonial rule and decolonisation. The importance of imposed or inherited structures, whether the global capitalist system, of which Africa is a subordinate part, or the artificial and often inappropriate state borders and political systems is discussed in the light of the exercise of agency by African peoples, political movements and leaders.

This title tells the story of the African leaders who ignited independence in black Africa during the 1960s through the eyes of two Americans who knew them well.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Foreword (Lúcia Nagib) -- Colonial Reflections, Post-Colonial Refractions: Film and the Moving Image in the Portuguese (Post- )Colonial Situation (Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro) -- Part I The Birth [through Images] of African Nations -- 1"Ruy Duarte: A Cinema of the Word Aspiring to Imagine Angolanness (Maria do Carmo Piçarra) -- 2"Between the Visible and the Invisible: Mueda, Memória e Massacre by Ruy Guerra and the Cultural Forms of the Makonde Plateau (Raquel Schefer) -- 3"Clear Lines on an Internationalist Map: Foreign Filmmakers in Angola at Independence (Ros Gray) -- 4"The Many Returns to Wiriyamu: Audiovisual Testimony and the Negotiation of Colonial Violence (Robert Stock) -- Part II The Fall of the Portuguese Empire: Foreign Gazes during the Cold War -- 5 'Rarely penetrated by camera or film': NBC's Angola:Journey to a War (1961) (Afonso Ramos) -- 6"The US and Portuguese Colonialism as Imagined through Television Drama (Rui Lopes) -- 7"African Independence and the Socialist Republic of Romania's Photographic Archive (Iolanda Vasile) -- Part III Moving Images, Post-Colonial Representations and the Archive -- 8"Colonial Collection of the Portuguese Film Archive: Shot, Reverse Shot, Off-Screen (José Manuel Costa) -- 9"A Decolonizing Impulse: Artists in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Archive, Or the Boxes of Departing Settlers between Maputo, Luanda and Lisbon (Ana Balona de Oliveira) -- 10"In-Between Memory and History: Artists' Films and the Portuguese Colonial Archive (Teresa Castro) -- Part IV Rethinking (Post- )Colonial Narratives: Artistic Takes -- 11 Drawing and Undrawing my Genealogy (Daniel Barroca) -- 12"A Grin without Marker (Filipa César) -- 13"Hotel Globo (Mónica de Miranda) -- Notes on Contributors -- Index