Beyond Federation: Ideas and Practices of East African Regionalism in a National and Global Age, 1950–1975

Abstract

In the period of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, when nationalism and globalism were hotly contested, East Africans nurtured regionalism in their intellectual and creative work. This book looks beyond political projects of federation to recover ideas and practices of regionalism, their remarkable longevity and their significance for understanding possibilities of radical change. In doing so, it tells a different story about the fate of the category of East Africa, building on a body of scholarship about the imagined political communities of decolonizing Africa, and rejecting narratives that explain the failure of regional integration as the immediate consequence of postcolonial authoritarianism or global economic crisis.