In the decades after the Second World War, activists across Africa began to shake the foundations of colonial rule. In Uganda, Senegal and the Congo, mass protests and strikes helped to popularise African nationalist ideas. In Algeria, Cameroon and Kenya, armed uprisings revealed the fragility of European control. Independent states like Egypt, meanwhile, became vibrant political hubs for activists and exiles from colonised territories. These efforts were concentrated in the African Association – a radical new organisation which allowed nationalist movements to share resources, publicise their campaigns, and attract international support to the struggle against imperial rule.
Founded in 1955, the African Association was originally intended as a cultural organisation for African students in Cairo. With financial support from the Egyptian government, however, it quickly developed into a coordinating body for anticolonial activists from Angola to Zanzibar. From the Association’s headquarters in the affluent ward of Zamalek, campaigners could travel freely to international conferences, secure scholarships for African students and broadcast news about the liberation struggle to audiences in their home countries. For a generation of activists, learning to navigate this complex world of patronage offered new opportunities to escape the confines of colonial rule and win support for radical causes.
Transnational stories like these play a valuable role in the wider history of national liberation. Early studies of decolonisation tended to focus on high politics, reconstructing debates within colonial administrations in depth. Later scholarship situated anticolonialism within the interpretative framework of the Cold War, demonstrating how radical movements were influenced by powerful sponsors on both sides of the Iron Curtain. These state-centred approaches have value – but they also risk obscuring the significant roles of individual activists. In the past ten years, thankfully, new research has begun to address these silences. Studies of transnational organisations and individual activists have helped to complicate narratives about the end of empire, exploring how campaigners used personal and social networks to challenge colonial power.
The first delegations to the African Association came from equatorial Africa. After the British and French governments banned the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), a group of activists led by Félix Moumié began looking for a headquarters in exile. Egypt was an attractive prospect – it was already home to nationalists and activists from across North Africa, and had given support to Algeria’s National Liberation Front in their own struggle against French colonialism. In July 1957, Moumié decided to create a permanent Cameroon Office at the African Association. A few months later, the Ugandan nationalist John Kalekezi followed suit. Like many activists of his generation, Kalekezi was under routine colonial surveillance and would likely have been detained by British authorities if he travelled to Cairo by air. Instead, he decided to cross the Sudanese border in secret, travelling north through the Nile Valley and settling in Zamalek as the external representative of the Uganda National Congress (UNC).
Over the course of the 1960s, the African Association would host some twenty-four nationalist parties from East, Central and Southern Africa. Some delegates, like Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Vusumzi Make of the Pan Africanist Congress, were already experienced activists. The majority of African Association members, however, were men in their twenties and thirties drawn from Cairo’s student population. In May 1958, for example, a group of Kenyans led by James Ochwata and Wera Ambitho followed John Kalekezi’s path through the Nile Valley, hoping to study in Europe. Upon arrival in Cairo, however, they decided to form a Kenya Office within the African Association. In 1960, the group even began styling themselves as the ‘Foreign Bureau of the Kenya African National Union’ (KANU), despite the fact that they had no formal ties to the party. This flexibility with the truth allowed Kenya Office members to cast themselves as authentic representatives of the nationalist movement, and with some success. In April 1961, KANU officials formally recognised the ‘outspoken but effective’ leaders of the Kenya Office as an important part of the nationalist movement.
Living in Cairo allowed the ‘furious young men’ of the African Association – as they were dubbed by the Egyptian press – to overcome colonial restrictions on international travel. Egypt maintained a strict neutrality in the Cold War, and the Nasser government provided stipends and travel documents that allowed delegates to attend conferences and meetings on both sides of the Iron Curtain. ‘If I leave [Egypt] for a trip to the outer posts of the world’, explained Vusumzi Make in a 1962 interview, ‘when I return there will be no questions asked. This kind of freedom is most important in our struggle’. This mobility also opened new opportunities for education, and the African Association quickly became a vehicle for distributing scholarships for universities in East Germany, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
Cairo also provided new opportunities for radical activists to speak to audiences across the world. Local printers like Mondiale Press published the African Association’s radical newsletters, like Uganda Renaissance and Zimbabwe Today, which were distributed in Cairo or smuggled into colonial territories. Zamalek was also an important diplomatic hub, allowing delegates to make statements to the news agencies and share information gathered by their personal networks across Africa. African Association members were also encouraged to use Radio Cairo’s powerful transmitters to produce creative broadcasts for audiences in their home countries. ‘Wake up, wake up: unite, oh black people’, sang Wera Ambitho on Cairo’s popular Swahili service. ‘Your star is rising – our freedom is coming as sure as the sun rises’.
The memoirs of the Zanzibari nationalist Suleiman Malik suggest that the structure of the African Association also encouraged cooperation between its various offices. Experienced delegates like John Kalekezi advised new colleagues on how to petition the Egyptian government for resources – and in return, activists passing through Cairo helped to supply news for anticolonial bulletins. The journalist Olabisi Ajala, who visited the African Association on his ambitious world tour, was impressed by its mess of offices and busy conference rooms, which left him with the impression of ‘a United Nations in miniature’. The social bonds between activists, in turn, encouraged campaigns of solidarity that surpassed national borders. In July 1959, for example, the African Association organised a ‘Day of Afro-Asian Solidarity with Uganda’, with activists from across the organisation appearing on Radio Cairo to express their sympathies for the ‘persecution and humiliation’ of Ugandans under colonial rule. After the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, similarly, the organisation held a two-day vigil in Tahrir Square with speeches from its Kenyan, Rwandan and Somali delegates.
At times, the Egyptian government appears to have used the African Association to its own ends. The Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser certainly had strategic reasons to provide African liberation movements with resources and support. As the memoirs of Egyptian officials reveal, many sought to use African nationalist movements to undermine their British and French rivals and to create new allies across the continent. Egyptian officials were a constant presence at the Zamalek headquarters – especially Mohamed Fayek, Nasser’s influential advisor on African Affairs. As Matteo Grilli has pointed out, officials like Fayek were responsible for assigning the broadcasting hours for each movement, allowing them to support cooperative offices and silence dissenters. A dramatic rift in the Kenya Office in the summer of 1959 also suggests that the Nasser government tried to exert control over nationalist groups. While Wera Ambitho’s followers stayed at the African Association, James Ochwata’s faction left for Moscow and Belgrade claiming that they objected to being ‘used as tools or stooges by the Egyptians’.
The relationship between African activists and the Egyptian state, however, was likely more complicated in practice. Accounts by several African Association delegates, including Suleiman Malik, insist that the Egyptian government gave them ‘complete independence’ to carry out their political work. The African Association produced material in a large variety of languages, from Luganda to Sesotho, and Egyptian officials would not always have been able to monitor the content directly. At times, the work of African nationalists in Cairo even clashed with the interests of the Egyptian state, threatening to undermine important diplomatic initiatives. Between and 1959 and 1961, for example, the Nasser government tried to improve its relationship with Britain – but these initiatives stalled when British colonial governments complained about the anticolonial work of African Association, threatening to oppose diplomatic talks if campaigners continued their radical rhetoric.
These anxieties were typical. The archives of British colonial territories demonstrate that imperial officials were consistently worried that transnational bodies like the African Association would allow radical nationalism to spread across Africa. In 1961, British officials in Kenya complained to London that the African Association was causing ‘infinite harm among [Kenyan] Africans’, accusing Ambitho’s broadcasts of ‘extreme scurrilousness’. These protests were sometimes self-serving: colonial officials often reported on the threat of anticolonial publicity to secure extra funds for their own propaganda efforts. Since a landmark court case against the British government in 2012, however, a large number of previously-classified colonial intelligence files have been released to the public. These files include internal reports on the Uganda Office’s efforts to send students to Eastern European universities, and anxious accounts of the ‘wide distribution’ of ‘extremely offensive propaganda’ by the Kenya Office. In the wake of violent uprisings like the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, colonial officials in East Africa interpreted the popularity of the African Association as proof that British rule was becoming unsustainable.
Amongst African nationalists, however, attitudes were mixed. The influential KANU campaigner Oginga Odinga remembered the African Association as a ‘cross-roads of contact between the Afro-Asian countries’, praising the organisation in his memoirs for opening ‘a vital diplomatic front’ in the Kenyan nationalist movement. Oginga’s ally Joseph Murumbi, by contrast, believed that activists like Wera Ambitho were ‘quite unsuitable’ for political work, arguing that their time in Cairo had left them ‘quite out of touch with events in Kenya’. The Zanzibari newspaper Mwongozi, meanwhile, published glowing reports of the activities of anticolonial nationalists in Cairo – not least because of the personal friendship between its editor Ali Muhsin and activists like Suleiman Malik. Muhsin’s rivals in the Afro-Shirazi Party, however, accused the organisation of perpetuating ‘Arab imperialism’ across East Africa, using party newspapers like Afrika Kwetu to warn their supporters about the ‘aims and objects’ of Cairo’s Swahili broadcasts.
The history of the African Association points to the multifaceted roles which transnational activists could play within the anticolonial movement. By relocating to Cairo, nationalist organisers were able to produce powerful publicity and attract international support for their movements. Social and personal ties between activists also helped to promote new forms of solidarity, allowing African Association members to present themselves as a united front against imperialism. This activism was carried out under the supervision of the Egyptian government – a relationship which could alienate other nationalist activists and produce new political tensions. Ultimately, however, the activists of the African Association learned to navigate these constraints, producing radical work which connected leftist organisers while unsettling a nervous colonial state.