Frank Gerits
PhD. EUI (2014), Postdoc Fellow NYU (2015), Postdoc Fellow International Studies Group, UFS (2016), Lecturer in Conflict Studies, UvA (2017), Lecturer in the History of International Relations, UU (2017), Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations, UU (2020)
Book. Project: The Ideological Scramble in Africa: How the Dream of African Development shaped a Continental Cold War (1945-1966).
Postdoctoral Project: Competing Continental Agendas: European Integration and African Union through African Eyes (1945-1966)
Supervisors: Dirk Moses, Federico Romero, Idesbald Goddeeris, Ian Phimister, and Timothy Naftali
Phone: +324755291246
Address: Utrecht University
Book. Project: The Ideological Scramble in Africa: How the Dream of African Development shaped a Continental Cold War (1945-1966).
Postdoctoral Project: Competing Continental Agendas: European Integration and African Union through African Eyes (1945-1966)
Supervisors: Dirk Moses, Federico Romero, Idesbald Goddeeris, Ian Phimister, and Timothy Naftali
Phone: +324755291246
Address: Utrecht University
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What was at stake in this scramble were the so-called ‘minds’ of African peoples. Nkrumah blamed colonialism for instilling non-white populations with an inferiority complex, while policy makers in the West drew on the insights of ethno-psychology to argue that underdevelopment was a psychological problem. To develop men into the modern mindset or, conversely, to create an ‘African Personality’, policymakers relied on education and information media.
When other African statesmen were unwilling to support Ghana’s pan-African vision, Nkrumah’s public discourse became more stridently anticolonial, in an attempt to mobilise the African general public. With the atrocities of the Congo crisis in mind, President John F. Kennedy and the Europeans began to see anticolonial nationalism as an emotional response to the tensions that came out of the modernisation process. Western officials therefore decided to modernise the socio-economic structures of ‘emerging’ societies, since psychological modernisation had failed.
Those shifting views on African development profoundly influenced the way in which the Bandung Conference, the Suez Crisis, the independence of Ghana, the Sahara atomic bomb tests and the Congo crisis were understood. As a whole, this analysis presents a sharp departure from a narrative in which non-Western actors are depicted as subaltern agents who can only resist or utilise Cold War pressures. It seeks to address the broader question of why pan-Africanism ultimately failed to become a fully developed interventionist ideology, capable of rivalling communist and capitalist proscriptions for African development.