ABSTRACT
Two threads of concerns hold together the extensive library of 20th-century life writing on African political leaders: the pursuit of freedom in post/colonial Africa and the entanglement of the national story with the individual’s exemplary life. In many respects, the essays collected in this volume grapple with the implications of these two threads and the blind spots they produce. The lives and actions of the political figures explored here set them apart as distinguished and exemplary, but that singularity is splintered by their enmeshment in collectives and institutions which point to the role of serendipity in the making of these figures’ eminence. This tension between the singular life and the fortuitous contexts that produce such singularity is further complicated by a third factor: the subsequent postponement of the freedom dreams that fueled collective struggles across the continent. Despite often strongly opposed ideological stances, the different anti-colonial collectives in each country had in common the dream of ending colonial unfreedom. What was unresolved, though, was the shape post-colonial freedom would take, and how to safeguard it from elite capture.
