ABSTRACT
This article explores how the process of decolonisation offers a perspective on the politics of identification, solidarity and becoming. The hope is to offer a way of tracing a concept of citizenship that may not only be tied to the nation state but to other forms of political organisation. To achieve this, the article draws on the work of Engin Isin and the concept of the ‘activist citizen’ as a lens through which to examine how citizenship in the mid-twentieth century decolonisation movements in Africa was imagined by ‘philosopher statesmen’ as a way of re-establishing a sense of pride in the village and the pan-African community, as locations of citizenship beyond the nation state. In discussing this the article analyses the speeches, articles and monographs of, Julius Nyerere, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, questioning whether these texts reveal a complicated notion of the postcolonial citizen which begin to re-establish a belief in the value of some sense of African identity as a response to the dehumanising efforts of colonialism; establishing local and pan-national spaces as locations for ‘acts’ of citizenship intended to re-establish a sense of pride in African identities.
