 African political thought is something which is not taught very much in the universities of the world. There's not even very much taught in African universities, and certainly in the North Atlantic there are only two places where you can take dedicated courses in African political thought. One is at Columbia University, it's taught by Professor Madami, and one here at SOAS taught by myself, but it's a daunting task. Don't forget there are 55 different countries in Africa, and even if you take out the five North African countries and you concentrate on sub-Saharan Africa, you're looking at a huge welter of national experiences, a huge welter of different aspirations that come out of different backgrounds. To talk about a single Africa is almost impossible. But what binds the southern countries of Africa, that is those countries that underneath the North African tip of Africa, is a colonial experience. Every single sub-Saharan African country was colonized with the exception of Ethiopia, and the Italians tried quite hard to colonize that country and were only very temporarily and partially successful. Ethiopia also stands out in the sense that it has had a very, very long history and it has a written language, the old language of geese, and you can still buy bibles from black marketeers in different Ethiopian cities, written in geese, which was the language of the priests, something like Latin in medieval Europe. And the five third Ethiopia was also a Coptic Christian nation, with probably the oldest liturgy in the Christian world, older than that of Roman Catholicism, makes that country very unique with very unique traditions. And yet it has participated in the whole discourse of what it means to be African, what it means to be an African political creature, and what it means to be an African state in today's international relations. So much so that the headquarters of the African Union are located in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, but when you're looking at the formation of African political thought there was in fact a very great deal of synergy, a very great deal of discussion and debate among black leaders the world over, not only from Africa but from the African diaspora. In the 20th century this made itself felt in a whole series of Pan-African Congresses. There were a number of these, they were held in different parts of the world, but chiefly in London and Paris, one in New York, but the most famous one was in 1945, held in Manchester. And to that particular Pan-African Congress came people like Kwame Nkrumah, the future Prime Minister of Ghana, Kenyatta, the future Prime Minister of Kenya, and you also had luminaries, intellectual luminaries from the black Afro-American experience, people like Webb Dubois, you had conservative people like Hastings Bander who would later become the first Prime Minister of Malawi, but they all came together in Manchester. And 1945 was a pivotal date because the whole idea of independence, the whole idea of liberation, the whole idea of what was going to happen to Africa after the end of World War II, that became paramount in their discussions. Under what ethos would Africa become independent? And Ghana was the first country to become independent in 1957. There was a whole slew of others from 1960 onwards and then the process of independence of freedom from colonial rule continued. There were some die-hard colonial regimes that held on. For instance it took Portugal until 1975 and it took a coup in Portugal engineered by young officers to persuade that country to let go of its colonies, the major ones being Angola and Mozambique. White minority regimes held sway in Rhodesia until 1980 and it became independent as Zimbabwe. And of course apartheid in South Africa lasted as long as 1990 and after the release of Nelson Mandela there were four years of quite fraught and difficult negotiations until the first majority rule elections were held in 1994. There are still all kinds of problems in Africa to do with independence. It took Eric Treer until the early 1990s to gain independence from Ethiopia. It took South Sudan only extremely recently to gain independence from Sudan. And there are still unresolved questions what to do about Somaliland. Should that be a country with independence of its own or a main part of Somalia? What about the vexed question of what used to be called Spanish Sahara? Does that get independence from Morocco? So there are questions of internal African colonialism which have yet fully to be resolved. But the whole idea that somehow Africa has now come into its own independent enough to make a statement in the world speaks to two kinds of political thought. First of all what kind of political thought governs each individual African country and what kind of political thought does Africa speak to when it's addressing the outside world? How does an independent series of African nations address the international relations of a very very vexed late 20th and 21st century? What you have when you look at the Manchester Conference of 1945 and the first real slew of independences from 1960 onwards is a period of only 15 years. That's an extremely short time. Europe itself was still recovering from the war throughout those 15 years and in the 1960s of course Europe undertook a renewal of a very conspicuous nature, the whole youth rebellion, the whole Beatles rock and roll phenomenon, the whole idea of a new generation finding its own feet not tied to the rationing, the poverty, the post-war recovery ethos of most of Europe that began to break loose at the same time as Africa began to break loose. So there's new political thought all around the world in Europe that led to the student uprisings of 1968. It led to the free speech movement at Berkeley and in American campuses round about the same time. It meant a world in which thought was new and sought to renew the world. The role of Africa, the place of Africa in this renewal of thought and trying to put fresh ideas on the table is the subject of this particular course. So it's not Africa in isolation. What you do have is two major contributions on the part of Africa to political thought, certainly in those early post-independence years. You had a sense particularly in the French-speaking countries of a certain negritude to use the words of those who'd gone to Paris to study and who fell underneath the sway of French philosophical movements, French thinkers such as Jean Poisartre, the whole existential circle, the idea that there could be a major contribution to world culture through African culture. The whole black is beautiful ethos that was then celebrated in song by people like Nina Simone. That whole idea of black is beautiful made a major contribution to the idea of Africa with pride. In other parts of Africa there was very very much the idea that indigenous thought, thought that had stemmed from African traditional values, could be married to the post-war social democratic values and socialist values that were beginning to find their feet in expression and in terms of new legislation and new social projects in Europe. The idea that there was a communalism, a shared experience that one could derive from the past, marry it to the present to carry the nation forward into the future and that the binding force, the cohesion of these ideas past, present, leading to the future could put nations on the map and nowhere perhaps was this more pronounced than in Zambia where there were some 70 different ethnic groups speaking 70 separate languages yet bound together in the statehood that married traditional thought, Christian values, social democratic values and British Labour Party values to do with the construction of a welfare state while all at the same time resisting the encroachments of white minority regimes immediately to the south. Week by week we'll be exploring all of these different strands of thought coming from Africa and discussing the contribution that they have made and can make to the world of international thought and to the world of international relations.