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Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›African Political Thought, Part 6: old liberationalists, new nationalisms, and Mugabe

African Political Thought, Part 6: old liberationalists, new nationalisms, and Mugabe

By Stephen Chan
November 12, 2015
2559
0

Mugabe 640

 

Welcome to Part 6 of our ten-part ten-minute lecture series on African Political Thought, brought to you by Stephen Chan, Professor of World Politics at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS). Each week, a short reading list will be published alongside the lecture. Viewers are also encouraged to pose questions they have for Chan in the comments section below.

If you’d like to get an update when new episodes go up, please send an email with subject line “APT” to [email protected] and you’ll be notified when new lectures are posted.

In this episode, we look at:

The old liberationists and their reassertion in new nationalisms: Mugabe’s political thought.

For an audio-only version:

Reading list for Part 6

Stephen Chan, Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Stephen Chan, Citizen of Zimbabwe: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai, Harare: Weaver, 2010.

Previous episodes

  • Part 1: Antecedents: race and romanticism in Africa – from WEB du Bois to the Manchester Conference to Senghor’s “˜negritude’.
  • Part 2: The thought of liberation: Cabral and the Lusophonic thinkers; the “˜pacific’ counterpoint of Kaunda.
  • Part 3: The New African Man: the political thought of transformation – Kaunda, Nyerere, Obote, Nkrumah.
  • Part 4: The degeneration into “˜Big Men’: case studies of Mobutu and Banda; the critique of Mbembe.
  • Part 5: The coup “˜artists’ and the new nationalisms-on-command: from Gowon to Rawlings; the contrasts between Sankara and Amin; the contrasts and similarities between Obasanjo and Abacha.

Coming next…

  • Part 7: Africa in the world: Mbeki’s African Renaissance – nostalgia and the toleration of the carnivalesque; Ngugi’s linguistic chauvinism; Mandaza’s neo-Marxist retrospection.
  • Part 8: The call for democracy: the critique of Soyinka; new constitutionalisms and the looking eastwards to China, Singapore and Malaysia; the model of Russian democracy.
  • Part 9: Pan-Africanism today: thought on the African Union.
  • Part 10: African intellectual currents and philosophy today: going it alone vs integration with a hegemonic world; Africa and the ICC, Africa and electronic globalisation; the thought of the outlawed commons.
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Stephen Chan

Stephen Chan is Professor of World Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He is the author of Kaunda and Southern Africa (Bloomsbury, 2021).

0 comments

  1. John Bol 14 November, 2015 at 07:47

    Why are all African countries are poor? Are countries poor because leaders are liberators, nationalists like Robert Mugabe? Why African leaders don’t learn from Europe, and North American histories?

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am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu