Discussion about this post

User's avatar
jbnn's avatar

'Countries have agency, and even peoples have agency. This was never the case under colonialism.'

?

They had slavery.

Until the colonial era.

So I'd say a lot of locals had a lot less agency pre- than during the colonial era.

'There is hardly any common, national history—because there is no agency'

And pre colonialism, which African territories can be termed 'nations' the way the author (and we) understand(s) the term? And which pre colonial era African nations (Ethiopia?) actually wrote their own history? Apart from religious works, Portuguese explorers and, especially, Arab slavers, what is there to read?

'What empires do to colonies is to-dehistorisize them. Not only by destroying the knowledge of the history there was, but not creating a new one'

I'm thankful for Tacitus' descriptions of what now is the Netherlands and the tribes living there. For my ancestors did...nothing.

'Even the worst dictatorship in an independent country implies shared agency of citizens'

What a relief. But typically agency seems to be distributed rather unevenly.

So I'm not sure ALL 1970s Ugandans would have preferred Idi Amin over Victtorian rule.

Absolutely', his tribal supporters and ethnic allies would have said.

His victims however...

PS. Many Indonesians are very aware that the Dutch colonial empire in the east massively expanded the Indonesian core territory of a few rival states on the island of Java into a nation the size of the width of the Atlantic ocean.

And despite the war of independence they hold no grudge. Perhaps because they understand very well that they as well - like basically every state or peoples on earth capable of it - had their expansionist era(s).

And perhaps because they remember how the Suharto regime murdered between 500.000 and 1.5 mln communist sand Chinese Indonesians in 65’.

Expand full comment
marcel proust's avatar

<i>And pre colonialism, which African territories can be termed 'nations' the way the author (and we) understand(s) the term? And which pre colonial era African nations (Ethiopia?) actually wrote their own history? Apart from religious works, Portuguese explorers and, especially, Arab slavers, what is there to read?</i>

Many over the centuries. Wikipedia has <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kingdoms_and_empires_in_African_history#List_of_African_kingdoms">a long list</a></b>, organized by region and era. I have done a quick and dirty count of the number of kingdoms and empires listed*, dropping both the earliest and latest periods, as well as North Africa. This gives the following table:

7thC – 12thC 13thC – 18thC

Central Africa 11 112

East Africa 33 170

Southern Africa 1 69

West Africa 84 157

I am not sure how to interpret "'nations' the way the author (and we) understand(s) the term". That polities as small as Andorra and San Marino are members of the UN, or using the somewhat higher bar of EU membership, Malta, I would be surprised if we did not find numerous "nations" in the list, especially in the second column, and especially in West Africa

*actually the number of rows shown, so likely a bit of an overcount for the number of polities.

Expand full comment
9 more comments...

No posts