HI3440 Sub-Saharan Africa 1870-2000

Course Organiser: Professor David Dickson
Duration: Academic Year
Contact hours: 3 hours per week
Weighting: 20 ECTS

This course aims to introduce students to a number of central themes in the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa south of the Sahara and to give them an opportunity to work with a diversity of primary sources, imperial and subaltern, external and indigenous. Initially we consider the state of African societies on the eve of the scramble against the backdrop of an increasing capacity and willingness of the European powers to project economic and military power deep within the continent. The scramble itself is explored through an examination of a variety of contemporary witnesses. We then explore the nature of colonial governance in the rival empires, from the most rapacious to the most nominal, setting this against geopolitical and economic changes in the outside world. We search for evidence as to the survival and accommodation strategies of African peoples placed within the rival European African empires, and try to plot the trajectory of social, cultural and economic change in countryside and town.

The impact of two world wars, not least on the theory and practice of imperialism, is a major concern, and the catalysts and consequences of decolonization, spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, become a central preoccupation in the second semester. A search for the causes of African economic ‘slippage’ since the 1960s takes us down several pathways, economic and political, autobiographical and literary, with a particular concern being an assessment of the impact of the Cold War on post-colonial state-building. An effort is thus made to chart the broad social and economic changes over the last 140 years within Sub-Saharan Africa, but a balance is sought between continent-wide analysis and regional focus. Three large regions receive particular attention: maritime west Africa stretching from Senegal to Cameroon; Africa from the Zambezi to the Cape; finally, east/central Africa – Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. And some intensely local case-studies and personal life-histories will be studied, drawn from very different regions and cultures, not least as a reminder of the huge diversity of African experience.