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Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity.

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IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 280 p.

"Books should be read and assessed as a reflection of their time" (2005: 255). So begins Immanuel Wallerstein's own reflection on his 1961 book on African independence. Surely it is not only contemporary generosity granted to works of preceding generations that requires our situating writings within the historical and political, economic and cultural contexts in which they were originally composed. Rather, to make sense of and to appreciate the nuance of argument, the hopes and the disappointments of an activist such as Immanuel Wallerstein, it is the least we owe to the texts and to our comprehension of them to read the 2005 single-volume reprint of Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967) through the eyes of that tumultuous time of Africa's emergence from formal colonial domination. These seminal texts were written at a time of optimism for the African continent, seen as throwing off the shackles of colonial rule and forging a new future, based on unity--whether regional or continental to stake Africa's claim in the Cold War world.

In Independence, Wallerstein positions himself as a storyteller of the unfolding narrative of Africa's history and future. An early scholar of African politics, Wallerstein engages in a detailed empirical inquiry to advance general theoretical claims about the wave of independence that swept Africa in the early 1960s. First, Wallerstein argues (in good Marxist form) that colonial structures auto-generated social conflict that would, in some cases, lead to anti-colonial revolution; and, second, Wallerstein argues, newly independent African states were given the task of holding together new social structures.

In chapters II and III, Wallerstein discusses the expansion of European imperialism as central to the project of European modernization and wealth, but rather than focussing on the metropolitan perspective on colonies, Independence examines the social changes within African societies through the process of colonization, and how these social changes themselves sowed the seeds of anti-colonial resistance. In other words, colonization effected a re-ordering of pre-existing governance and social...

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