4 - Publicity and Violence in the Shadow of Algeria

Summary

In early 1959, Kanyama Chiume escaped arrest during the Nyasaland Emergency. Chapter 4 follows him in his period of exile, focusing on two pamphlets he wrote in London. These pamphlets provide a way to assess the limits of the newly internationalised global anticolonial world of the late 1950s for this regional-generational cohort. These activists honed their vision of publicity and of the party publicity officer by drawing on the regional specificities of the late colonial state in East and Central Africa. Gender and form were of critical importance to this vision. This cohort joined the conversation around colonial violence in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, discussing ideas about permits, police and imprisonment in and beyond the region, in correspondence, conferences and publications. Charting the development of their ideas about totalitarianism at this apparent turning point helps to explain why the UN was largely out of reach, why activists continued to formulate their critiques in terms that echoed the early 1950s and why they increasingly doubted the efficacy and legitimacy of world public opinion.