ASC-075287668-2887-01

Creating Mali1From the 1960s onwards, historians constructed a periodisation that still structuresthe practice of African history. The division then made, into pre-colonial,colonial, and post-colonial periods, now impedes a more profound understandingof current affairs on the continent. Stephen Ellis has already pointed out thatwriting on contemporary Africa remains largely steeped in a modernist discoursethat aims to stimulate economic and political development. Alongsidesuch usual suspects as journalists and political scientists, he fingers historiansfor their continued attachment to social theories and analyses held over from theheady days of social engineering. 1 Such concerns do not necessarily shed lighton issues important in Africa today. Much recent historical scholarship arguesagainst national histories and so do I here. But I would like to argue, as I havedone elsewhere, that histories that take the nation-state as a unit of analysis,rather than serving a nationalist purpose, might make an important contributionto understanding the genealogies of contemporary African politics. 2 Studied indepth, independence, like colonialism, proves to be a gradual process withvarious stages and scales of interdependence, often labelled as neo-colonialism.But understanding the following assumption to be wrong, that all former colonialsubjects desired independence in the same way, is rather new, at least inAfrican history. From the 1950s onwards, most Africanists have been enthralledby the independence myth, and they set out to write national histories for thenewly independent states, or at least to frame their subject matter – be it economic,social, or cultural – in a national grid. However, Africa in the midtwentiethcentury saw a number of violent political conflicts over independencethat belied the myth of national unity. The most notorious of these were the12Ellis, S. 2002.Lecocq, B. & G. Mann 2003.