Globalizing Independence Struggles of Lusophone Africa - by Rui Lopes & Natalia Telepneva (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first coherent treatment of Lusophone Africa's independence struggles, including rich empirical chapters that draw on sources beyond the usual Western archives.

Book Synopsis

Lusophone Africa has been neglected in Anglophone historiography.With the exceptions of a narrow set of episodes, figures, and interpretations, all of which appear in a fragmented set of journal articles, its struggles against Portuguese colonialism have remained outside the grand narratives of decolonisation.

In this open access book, a group of established and up-and-coming historians of Lusophone Africa bring much-needed coherence to this interconnected set of anti-colonial struggles in order to show how people and ideas from these countries crossed borders around the globe. Its international team of contributors draws on a an underutilized range of source material beyond the usual Western state archives in order to cover a wide geographic scope, from North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia, all while critically examining the consequences of such international connections within the Lusophone states themselves.

For its empirically rich, original contributions to the grand narratives of African independence struggles, this book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in African history, decolonization, and the Cold War, and it is of keen interest to anyone interested in alternative histories of decolonization.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Review Quotes

This important collection assembles an international group of scholars whose work deepens and extends the study of twentieth century decolonisation in exciting ways. Lopes and Telepneva have crafted a coherent framework which brings into focus a very rich diversity of analyses and perspectives. Ranging across an extended empirical terrain from diplomacy and economic cooperation to film, this volume brings substance, detail and context to crucial themes such as liberation, solidarity, 'global cold war' and non-alignment. Delving into diverse archives, the authors construct compelling accounts which situate the independence struggles of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe within global dynamics as well as highlighting their internal tensions. These close studies of linked anticolonial struggles and the difficult quest for postcolonial reconstruction bring to the fore overlooked actors, re-evaluate existing narratives, and chart new frames of analysis and understanding.

This is an essential collection for scholars of empire and its oppositions. Connecting local concerns with wider anti-colonial pressures, the contributors explain why liberation struggles in Lusophone Africa became so emblematic of global decolonization and the coalitions it brought together.
Professor Martin Thomas, Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society, University of Exeter, UK

About the Author

Natalia Telepneva is Lecturer in International History at University of Strathclyde, UK. She is the author of Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and Collapse of Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 (2022) and co-editor of Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (I.B Tauris, 2018).

Rui Lopes is a Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck University of London, UK. He is the author of West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship, 1968-1974: Between Cold War and Colonialism (2014).