ABSTRACT
‘Racial’ ideas were far from being the sole preserve of colonisers and their intellectual supporters. Historically important, complex and too often overlooked currents of racialised thought developed too albeit often under a degree of European influence among the colonised, sometimes with monstrous consequences. The schoolteachers and their rhetoric typify the elite intelligentsia who dominated mainstream nationalism throughout Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Nationalism is one variant of ethnic thought that has proven especially susceptible to racialization. By the mid-twentieth century, the politics of the nation-state had become a global ‘categorical order,’ a set of concepts taken for granted by leading political thinkers throughout the colonial world. The African Association’s rhetoric of racial solidarity appealed most directly to mainlanders but, with the introduction of electoral politics, its activists also used it in efforts to win support from indigenous islanders.
