African History

Throughout African history, distant as well as recent, Africans have resisted forces of domination. The theme of Africans rejecting or fighting the rule of others, African or non-African, and their struggle against forms of domination, injustice or exploitation has been a closely studied subject ever since the inception of modern African studies in the early 1960s. The interest in this central theme emerged in the heyday of anti-colonial struggle that was itself generally articulated through modern nationalist discourse. Spurred on by what appeared as the unstoppable tidal wave of decolonization after the Second World War, which reinforced the already widespread feeling that colonialism was a grossly unjust dispensation, many scholars felt the need to investigate whether and to what extent Africans had, all along, resisted the forces of colonial or white settler rule.

This set the stage for representations of African reactions to colonialism as falling between resistance and collaboration - notions that were redolent of Europe during the Second World War. It also preceded the theme, pioneered by Terence Ranger, of the modern nationalist struggles of the 1950s and 1960s somehow being connected with earlier forms of violent resistance to the imposition or maintenance of colonial rule. Besides collaboration, European settlement and occupation were seen as having triggered, first, early forms of violent struggle (so-called 'primary' resistance) and, now, modern nationalist battles for independence ('secondary' resistance). The concept of resistance thus became the historical dimension of African nationalism.

Inevitably, in later years, questions started to be raised about this representation of African twentieth-century history. By the late 1960s historians had accepted that the construction of this history around the two antipoles 'resistance' - 'collaboration' grossly simplified its actual complexities. Resistance and collaboration were now seen as rational, alternative strategies to Africans trying to defend their interests in the face of the imposition of colonialism and capitalism - comparable in some ways, perhaps, to analyses of European reactions to Nazi occupation in terms of varying degrees of accommodation rather than through the moral prism of collaboration and resistance. More fundamentally, and much later, it was opined by Glassman that the historical resistance literature was marred by a teleology that constructed all African protest as leading inexorably to modern nationalism and decolonization.

A fundamental point of criticism of the early resistance literature was that the focus on resistance to white people or colonialism implied concentrating more on mere reactions of Africans than their true agency in historical development. Moreover, historians of modern African nationalism stressed the role played by elites, just as writers on imperial history had done. During the 1970s, therefore, scholars began to add a nuance to this elitist perspective by focusing increasingly on the issue of class structure, arguing that it was the specific configuration of class interests that determined whether Africans resisted or collaborated with colonial or white settler rule. Marxist paradigms inspired a shift away from the search for the roots of nationalism to a search for the roots of underdevelopment, especially because by then so many African countries were stricken by growing economic malaise and political instability. It was argued that the earlier focus on resistance and nationalism obscured the extent to which Africans had been unable to strike at what were held to be the real structures of oppression, i.e. not colonial administrations but metropolitan capital (on which more below). Studies on so-called 'modes of production' began the redefinition of protonationalist resisters in African colonial history into peasants fighting international capitalism.