This chapter presents a special instance of education reform in which South African students presented a compelling case for curriculum change under decolonization. At first, it appeared that all conditions for successful change were in place – receptive university leadership; compelling educational rationale; pressing political demand; and widespread support among academic teachers. A massive colonial statue was toppled of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town campus. For a short but powerful moment (2015–2016) academic faculties refocused their energies on critical concepts such as decoloniality, what it might mean and how it could be implemented. Special seminars, invited speakers, funded projects, senate authorizations, and commissioned task teams sprung into action to “decolonize the curriculum.” Five years later, little had changed both for the disciplinary curriculum (e.g., sociology or chemistry) or the institutional curriculum (i.e., the rules and regulations that govern legitimate knowledge). Why? Based on interviews with more than 200 academic teachers across 10 universities, this case study demonstrates how exactly institutions temper radical ideas. This is a specific case of radical reform in a broader struggle to decolonize knowledge from Cape Town and Bristol to Antwerp and South Carolina.

The UN General Assembly, a body including representatives of all UN member governments, serves as the primary forum for defining a better world order through peaceful change. It has endorsed programs of peaceful change at all levels of ambition at different times and on different issues. Much of its activity has focused on the minimalist goal of averting or ending particular wars. On other issues, most notably decolonization, national economic development, and adding environmental concerns to the intergovernmental agenda, it has contributed to incremental change in the states system. Yet the limits on what governments would endorse became clear on issues such as human rights where changes would affect domestic political orders. The end of the Cold War and related domestic-level political changes provided the context for higher ambition, which peaked in 2005 when the General Assembly endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offered a vision of deep peace in which universal respect for human rights, human development, and human security prevail within ecologically sustainable societies. Yet the subsequent spread of authoritarian rule within states and increased geopolitical tensions between major states have reinforced governments’ traditional approaches to states system, reducing the ambition of programs for peaceful change.

Wedderburn’s final pamphlet, Address to the Lord Brougham and Vaux, contributed to the early nineteenth-century political “war of representation” about whether Black people in the West Indies would be willing to work for wages after emancipation. Although seeming to reiterate the proslavery claim that enslaved people in the West Indies had better living conditions than European wage laborers, Wedderburn’s vision of dwelling on the land outlined a nuanced, speculative decolonial future. The Conclusion finally argues that narratives of the Romantic revolutionary age should include Black abolitionist geographies, a revolution cultivated on common land with pigs, pumpkins, and yams.

Chapter 2 explores the figure of the white mercenary in the context of decolonization by analysing the outcome of the Luanda trial and the response of the UK government to the indictment of its nationals in Angola. This is essential to highlight the fundamental distinction between these foreign fighters and the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War: fighting for personal profit as opposed to fighting for a noble cause, respectively. However, Western soldiers of fortune seem to be moved by certain political ideals: namely, to avoid a communist takeover of the African continent. The figure of the adventurer encountered in the interwar period reappears here, illustrating the ambivalent passions underlying attempts to ban or endorse mercenarism. The chapter ends with an analysis of the travaux of Art. 47 of API which frames the eventual exclusion of mercenaries from prisoner of war status in international armed conflicts.

For many postcolonies, a national currency—like a constitution, flag, or passport—was a necessary accompaniment to independence. Money and credit were more than potent symbols of decolonization; they were means of constituting a new political order. This Introduction argues that the monetary regimes established in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania aimed to remake their independent societies, turning savings, loans, and other financial instruments into the infrastructure of citizenship and statecraft. These instruments tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through mechanisms that were simultaneously ethical and economic, cultural and political. They did so because colonial subjects experienced empire as not only political domination but also a constraint on economic liberties. Yet, the ensuing decolonization was at best partial, not least because the value of national currencies depended on the accumulation of foreign money. Moreover, the independent political economy of East Africa created new inequalities and divisions. Struggles over money, credit, and commodities would animate a series of struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers in the coming decades. By detailing the notion of the “moneychanger state,” this chapter provides the conceptual frameworks to understand these conflicts in new ways.

This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

Examining and contesting the emergence of ‘third world theatre’ in the mid twentieth century, Brueton traces how Jean-Marie Serreau, the director feted for his inaugural productions of absurdist plays by Ionesco and Beckett, sought to disrupt the Eurocentric nihilism of the post-war dramatic canon. Serreau brought the anticolonial drama unfolding throughout the Empire to Parisian stages. Producing seminal works by the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, Martinican poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire, and French iconoclast Jean Genet, Serreau pursued a radical new humanism that aimed to decentre the intellectual and artistic hegemony of the West. He envisaged a third world theatre that would not only eschew the ghettoization of major Francophone playwrights but also contest the very values of colonial humanism that had developed under France’s Third Republic. Brueton compares Kateb’s representation of the anticolonial uprisings in Algeria in Le Cadavre Encerclé (The Encircled Corpse, 1958); Genet’s critique of French imperialism and Algerian neo-nationalism in Les Paravents (The Screens, 1966); and Césaire’s tragic exposition of Congolese independence from Belgium in Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967), to argue that they refuse forms of understanding where cultural difference is reduced to one decolonial agenda.

Rice in West Africa is cultivated in different ecological, social, and agricultural settings. This chapter takes these diverse environments as the entry point for revisiting the history of the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) and of rice research and breeding in the region. Irrigated rice emerged as a major environment of focus in the colonial period, primarily serving rice schemes in the dry zone of former French colonies Mali, Senegal, and northern Ivory Coast. Colonial projects excluded the humid uplands, a prominent rice environment across the forested zones of West Africa. Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s initially implied a focus on national environments, followed by a regrouping into three main environments when WARDA was established in 1970. WARDA’s strategy excluded the humid uplands until the 1990s, although experts, including CGIAR advisors, argued early on for the importance of the humid uplands as a major environment for research and improvement. The chapter contrasts these findings with standard historical accounts of WARDA that highlight technical breeding capacity, a perspective fitting its radical policy change and rebranding in the 2000s.