This panel examines how Africans mobilized real and imagined connections to former colonial powers in the decades just before and after the end of empire. Our three case studies explore cases where Cameroonians, Ethiopians, and Tanzanians drew on disparate kinds of relationships with Germans and Italians for political purposes.

Most of the scholarship on similar topics has focused on relationships between Africans and proximate colonial powers such as the United Kingdom or France. All three of the papers in our proposal, in contrast, analyze Africans' relationships with defeated colonial powers, Germany and Italy, where the end to the colonial relationship was imposed by other European nations/the United States rather than won through African activism. We posit that a comparison between our case studies and the better-known examples of relationships with the United Kingdom and France will prove fruitful for understanding the meaning that Africans attributed to Europeanness after the end of empire.

The papers that make up this panel bring together voices and sources from three African nations and two European ones. Each focuses on the stories of an African individual or individual family with long personal connections to the European colonial state. Sara Pugach's paper explores how Cameroonians called on notions of kinship originating in the German colonial era to petition both West and East Germany for various kinds of assistance in the 1960s. Nicola Camilleri examines Elena Sengal's activism and identity formation in Ethiopia after her return there in the wake of Italy's defeat in the Second World War. Matthew Unangst writes about the relationship of Adam Sapi Mkwawa with East Germany in the frame of Sapi's grandfather's military defeat by German forces in the 1890s. The relationships in the three cases were framed much differently, from a familial relationship in Cameroon, to a relationship of having lived and worked in Italy in Ethiopia, to one of conflict in Tanzania. When considered together, we expect the papers to spark conversation about how and why these different frames mattered and were deployed.

These papers speak to audiences interested in both African and European post-1945 history, as well as historians interested in postcolonial ideas more generally. They demonstrate how Africans continued to make meaning out of colonialism after its conclusion.