Eddembe

Freedom was a partially shared conceptual and political terrain of struggle in the late colonial world. African nationalist politicians framed freedom as a unitary concept that transcended regional and ethnic loyalties that formed part of the architecture of indirect rule. Some, such as Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta, celebrated the Kiswahili term uhuru as an ideal uniting East Africans not only against colonial rule but also in collective projects of postcolonial nation-building. Their hope was that shared experiences of colonial subjugation would nourish a common vocabulary of emancipation, whose meanings could be controlled by a new ruling class. However, neither freedom nor uhuru nor numerous other terms that colonial subjects invoked to challenge their oppression were ever so easily contained. Nationalists had to contend with and often directly combat others’ formulations of freedom. Those who found themselves outside of the nascent ruling elite swiftly rejected new rulers’ claims to control the meaning of these words. A shared vocabulary did not inherently reflect commonly understood and stable meanings.