Decentering the Nation in Decolonization: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe

The transfers of power across Asia and Africa in the mid-twentieth century have often been characterized as the triumph of the nation-state. Histories of decolonization have reified this model, telling us about the emergence of individual states or the fragmentation of specific empires. Any studies cutting across empires tend to isolate one region, such as “sub-Saharan Africa,” from similar processes elsewhere. Consequently, the political thought of many figures working for dramatic reformulations of imperial relationships have been pigeonholed into an anachronistic or incomplete “nationalism.” Most historians recognize the “anticolonial nationalist” as a global subject, but begrudge them no greater complexity than nationalism.

This paper begins to redress these deficiencies by de-centering the nation, or even the empire, as the unit of analysis, and uses a single individual’s political trajectory to see the complexities of scale and vision involved in working for what historians have termed “decolonization.” Historians have acknowledged Nnamdi Azikiwe’s pan-Africanism, but usually in isolation from his work as a “nationalist” leading Nigeria to independence. I question these categorizations by looking at Azikiwe’s visions of the national, regional, imperial, and global at two moments: his 1943 press tour of Britain, when he proposed devolution within the British Empire for its West African colonies, and his response to the Bandung Conference in 1955 just after taking office in Nigeria’s Eastern Region. Using Azikiwe’s extensive newspaper commentaries and archival records, this paper points to an imperial subject working for “decolonization” within empire and anticolonialism around the world, rather than mere nationalism.