Gerits’ book is part of a scholarship which, in the wake of Westad's The Global Cold War, seeks to pay more attention to the role played by the developing world in the Cold War. Gerits, however, criticises much of this scholarship, especially those studies produced by international historians, which ‘never abandon the bipolar international system in favour of a multi-directional analysis of the battle for modernity’ (10). The author contends that, for the most part, this reading of history underestimates the importance of ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘liberationist’ ideologies in the competition for the best development model and their impact on the international system. This is particularly true for the African continent in the period taken into examination by Gerits, that is, the first two decades after WWII. In this context, African liberationists, proponents of Pan-Africanism as a ‘liberationist interventionist ideology’, did not only pose an obstacle to the Cold War entrance into Africa and did not only seek to play the Cold War powers against each other. They instead challenged the USSR, ‘the empire of equality’, the United States, ‘the empire of liberty’, and the European ‘empires of exploitation’, with their own alternative ‘anti-colonial modernity’. The latter, Gerits explains, is based on the legacy of the Haitian revolution and is then connected to the evolution of the Pan-African and anti-colonial movements, seeing ‘precolonial ideas not as an obstacle but as a precondition for effective development’ (181). Gerits seeks to demonstrate – and this is the book's most intriguing and innovative aspect – how ‘African visions actually altered imperial and Cold War structures’ (11). Gerits argues that anticolonial interventionist ideologies forced Cold War powers and European ex-colonial masters to significantly modify their foreign policy in Africa, including their public diplomacy. This happened at least until liberationist ideologies started to crumble at the end of the period under consideration (1966) when a new African leadership became unhappy about the results of ‘anti-colonial modernity’. Historians, Gerits writes, have constantly portrayed the endeavours of the ‘Pan-African alternative’ as a ‘failed project’ which fell victim to Cold War intrusions. Gerits argues that these scholars have underestimated how liberationists shaped the post-colonial order. In this regard, it is true that the impact of African liberationist ideologies on the West and the East has been indeed underestimated, as is clearly shown by Gerits. At the same time, a significant body of literature already demonstrates how African ideologies radically influenced post-colonial Africa beyond the Cold War divide. Gerits should have acknowledged this more clearly.
The book draws on Gerits’ doctoral research and is the product of over 10 years of work. Some of the ideas in the book have been expressed in the author's prior publications, dating to the second half of the 2010s. From a methodological perspective, the book makes impressive use of primary sources extracted from 46 archives and 10 universities in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Key is the use of African archival sources, which provides the means for an ‘Africa-centred methodology’. In the book's eight chapters, Gerits presents the perspectives of diplomats and politicians from around the world, providing readers with unprecedented insights into this period.
Certain aspects of the book could have been further developed or explored in greater depth. For instance, the concepts of ‘anti-colonial modernity’ and ‘racial modernity’ remain vague throughout the book. Equally ambiguous is the definition of ‘federations of liberation’. Also, it is not entirely clear who the ‘liberationists’ were. In Gerits’ analysis, they were those leaders who promoted Pan-Africanism as an ‘interventionist ideology’. However, according to Gerits’ premises, it seems that only Nkrumah and Nasser fully embodied this paradigm during this period. Nasser's commitment to Pan-Africanism waned after 1963, as he shifted his focus to the Non-Aligned Movement and the Middle East. As for Nkrumah, Gerits describes his ‘African Personality’ as ‘an idealized image of the past’ (5) and the Ghanaian leader as someone who ‘harkened back to an idealized pastoral past’ coupled with modern technology to ‘jump-start development’ (8). His ideology, which Gerits does not refer to as ‘Nkrumaism’, is therefore equated to Ujamaa in its essential objectives (5). This assertion may lack persuasiveness, given Nkrumah's emphasis on promoting heavy industrialisation at the expense of agriculture and his staunch opposition to ‘traditional’ authorities in Ghana. Compared to Nyerere, Nkrumah's belief in an idealised past appears much less heartfelt. Finally, the book offers limited analysis regarding the role played by African French-speaking ‘moderates’, as well as the involvement of the USSR and China.
This being said, the book holds significant importance, as it contributes to a redefinition of the role played by African actors in the international system and sheds light on how they influenced the formation of the African post-colonial order.
