'To Seek With Beauty to Set the World Right': Cold War International Law and the radical 'imaginative geography' of Pan-Africanism (original) (raw)

2019, Craven, Pahuja & Simpson (eds), International Law and the Cold War

In 1961 Togolese President Sylvanus Olympio published an essay in Foreign Affairs entitled ‘African Problems and the Cold War’, which sought to address two ‘significant questions’ facing newly-independent African states: one of which was keeping out of the Cold War, the other the future of Pan-Africanism. While staying out of the Cold War was certainly a known concern of African states at the time, Olympio’s focus on Pan-Africanism, and its relevance to the Cold War, might appear odd to contemporary readers. The link between them lies in Pan-Africanism’s now-forgotten attempts to radically re-imagine, and then re-write ‘the global’; a project that began at the turn of the century, was taken up by Pan-Africanists such as W E B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Peter Abrahams, and which by 1961 had reached its zenith. It would ultimately fail for numerous reasons, and President Olympio would play a minor, inglorious role in its demise; however, it was one overshadowed by the role played by the Cold War and international law. In order to tell the story of Pan-Africanism’s failed attempts to re-write the global and the role of the Cold War and international law therein, this Chapter will turn to African literature — and two novels in particular: Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo (1956) and Ousmane Sembene’s The Last of the Empire (1981).