Focusing on the field’s structure, this chapter shows that African journalists use the ethnic conflict frame to cover African atrocities. This frame is deployed by African journalists even though they and scholars argue that it is stereotypical and oversimplifies complex social processes. This chapter contextualizes its use within Africa while pushing against simplistic readings of its existence. It argues that this frame engages in the politics of who is African while relying on specific collective memories about political manipulation of identity, colonial subjugation, and the war on terror discourse.

The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.

This chapter retraces the radical ‘imaginative geography’ of Pan-Africanism (and its demise) through the literature of Abrahams and Sembene. Beyond exploring the imaginative geography of the texts it also calls attention to the imaginative or discursive nature of geography itself. It is argued that the ‘imaginative geography’ of the Cold War served to circulate and sediment a particular way of ‘writing global space’ (a ‘geopolitics’), which in turn legitimised the ‘world of states’, and de-legitimised its alternatives. The Cold War and international law, it is argued, conspired to defeat Pan-Africanism’s radical project to rewrite the global.