Review of the book from Milford, Ismay. 2023. African Activists in a Decolonising World. The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952-1966. New York: Cambridge University Press. 298 pages. ISBN 978-1-009-27699-3.
With “African Activists”, Ismay Milford offers a detailed analysis of anticolonial activism and thought, carried out and expressed by a generation of East and Central African student-activists during the 1950s and 1960s. Based on her PhD thesis, submitted at the European University Institute (EUI) in 2019, this book compiles insights from extensive transnational research, funded, enabled and supported by the EUI, the UK government and several European and African universities and institutions. As a result, Milford’s book contributes to a growing body of literature on decolonization processes, emphasising transnational connections, individual trajectories and anticolonial imaginaries beyond the metropole-colony focus, the Cold War binary and the glamorous ranks of high diplomacy (see for example James/Leake 2015, Burton 2019, Getachew 2019, Ghirmai 2019, Burbank/Cooper 2023). Networks created and maintained by non-state actors, such as anticolonial activists, students and writers, take centre stage in these new histories of decolonization (Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective 2018). Milford demonstrates how an actor-following approach meets the demands of this research agenda by understanding decolonization in terms of its constitutive social and intellectual processes (pp. 2-3).