This annual AHR Conversation focuses on the issues and historiographic debates raised by the term “Black Internationalism.” Participants Monique Bedasse, Kim D. Butler, Carlos Fernandes, Dennis Laumann, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Benjamin Talton, and Kira Thurman bring a wide array of interests and areas of expertise to bear on the origins, evolution, and meaning of the concept of Black Internationalism; its application within Africa, the U.S., and the African diaspora more generally; and its relationship to gender, nationalism, and anticolonialism. In addition to tracing the deep roots of this framework for writing the history of Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy as global phenomena, they insist on seeing Black Internationalism from multiple points on the compass. Perspectives derived from the history—and intellectual production—of Africa, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean prove just as important, if not more so, than those emanating from the United States.
This article focuses on the events surrounding the 1940 Konkomba attack on the predominantly Dagomba village of Jagbel, in what is today Ghana's Northern Region. This event demonstrates that the antagonism that became characteristic of the relationship between these two groups in the postcolonial period was a product of the political structure that the British colonial administration imposed. A central feature of this structure was indirect rule, which the British developed around "tribe" and "chieftaincy. " Groups whose system of authority satisfied British definitions of tribe and chieftaincy were recognized as politically legitimate. Those that did not were largely disenfranchised. As part of indirect rule, British officials forced the historically non-centralized Konkomba clans under the political jurisdiction of Dagomba nas, or chiefs, despite little historical precedent for such a relationship. By defining the political status of groups in strict terms, the British fostered the development of politicized ethnic identities and the use of symbols that came to be associated with these identities as resources as they competed for political and natural resources. This political inequality in local society and, therefore, conflict and tension between ethnic groups persisted under Ghana's postcolonial regimes and led to more protracted violence between 1980 and 1994.
Scholars and other commentators have largely characterized the histories of African nations in terms of failed states, economic underdevelopment, political corruption, and civil war. This introduction and the articles that follow demonstrate the utility of breaking out of the mold of measuring African “successes” and “failures” in terms of national politics and economics, without due consideration of local political histories, popular culture, and the arts, which offer a dramatically different view of Africa’s and Africans’ influences and success within the continent and on the global stage. Toward that end, this introductory essay advocates mitigating the standard analytical model through close studies of relationships between Africans and people of African descent in which politics and economic “development” are placed alongside the arts, popular culture, and sports, with a particular emphasis on the critical decade of the 1960s as central to shaping the course of “postcolonial” African histories.
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