ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 considers the ways in which trajectories of postcolonial nation building are ruptured by the systematic assassinations of revolutionary leaders. The carefully planned murders of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara are not only tragic events that bring the individual trajectories of young revolutionaries to an abrupt end but they cut across what can be called “nation time,” the deeply layered, complicated chronopolitics that newly formed nation-states struggle with. With this in mind, the chapter argues that decolonizing regions that aspire to transition into peaceful postcolonial nation-states must struggle with the triple bind of time. The first bind of time is established during the colonial era, and it subjugates the colonized population by relegating them to a primitive anterior time that forecloses their entry into modernity and history. The second bind of time is imposed by anticolonial leaders themselves when they ask newly radicalized masses to put on hold their identitarian or political concerns for the collective good of nation. And finally, as the postcolonial nation seems close to becoming a reality, the Cold War swoops in by staging brutal murders of able-bodied, male revolutionaries who have come to stand in for the nation symbolically and physically.
