Cold War Creolization: Ousmane Sembène's Le dernier de l'empire (original) (raw)
Craven, Pahuja & Simpson (eds), International Law and the Cold War , 2019
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).