NATION-STATES AND REGIONAL ORDERS

Comparing maps of late colonial and post-colonial Africa suggests a picture marked by continuity of colonial borders. But what these maps do not show are layers of governance and imagined governance which cut across those borders.

Both the French and the British empires in Africa had often in practice been governed regionally rather than straightforwardly as territorial states, so that in addition to imperial legal and political structures, there were also regional structures of government and law. In the case of East Africa, although British attempts in the 1920s to create an East African Federation had failed, more modest efforts to centralize the delivery of key services were more successful. By the time of independence, significant parts of government activity were administered at the East African, rather than the territorial, level, through the East African High Commission which was established in 1948. It is striking how many areas of life came under the High Commission's auspices, ranging from the economic dimensions of currency and tariffs to transport through East African Railways and Airways to cultural institutions such as the East African Literature Bureau.

As Tanganyika's independence approached in 1961, the High Commission became the East African Common Services Organization, establishing the principle that services would continue to be developed at the regional level after independence. But nationalist leaders in East Africa were open to the possibility of something more far-reaching. While colonial projects for an East African federation had been bitterly opposed by African politicians, in the early 1960s East African leaders followed post-colonial leaders elsewhere in the world in espousing a willingness to sacrifice their newly won sovereignty in the cause of unity. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere even offered to postpone Tanganyika's independence so that it would coincide with independence for Kenya and Uganda, allowing them immediately to federate.

This he would do, he said in a speech, ‘rather than take the risk of perpetuating the balkanisation of East Africa'.^{^[558]} In June 1963, the leaders of Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda committed themselves to federation. But the optimism of June 1963 quickly faded and political federation proved impossible to achieve.^{^[559]} The East African Community which was finally established in 1967 has generally been seen as a project of limited scope and without great public support, lamented by few when it finally collapsed in 1977.^{^[560]} Projects of regional federation therefore seem to have had little traction in national contexts.

But if we look beyond the high politics of federation, a different story can begin to be told. A long-standing history of movement around the region and the existence of English and Swahili as lingua francas meant that newspapers like the Swahili-language Baraza, published in Nairobi from 1939 but read across East Africa and with contributions to its letters pages from across the region, constituted a space for reflection and comment on the downsides as well as the advantages of nation-state building projects and regional integration. The voices we hear in Baraza are those of a cosmopolitan elite, committed to greater unity. Their arguments for closer integration were often pragmatic. Those doing business across borders, for example, complained about the difficulties caused by having different currencies. Yet there were also more positive arguments for regional unity. The editorials in Baraza consistently argued for the East African Community to be a first step towards a closer political union. This argument was, for example, made in the editorial in December 1967 which marked the establishment of the East African Community, and it was sustained through a difficult period in 1971 and 1972 when Idi Amin's seizure of power in Uganda, opposed by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, saw the Community effectively cease to function.^{^[561]}

As tensions eased in 1972, a powerful Baraza editorial called for greater regional unity as an essential final step in completing the process of decolonization.

The editorial repeated calls on East Africa's leaders to go beyond economic unity and establish a full political union. While the East African Community has often been seen, both at the time and since, as a technocratic project, distant from popular concerns, Baraza claimed to be speaking for ordinary people who, the newspaper argued, were the ones who suffered from the artificial barriers placed in their way by national borders, separate currencies and restrictions on moving to work or do business in neighbouring countries.^{^[562]}

Political leaders, Baraza argued, had once rejected national borders as artificial creations, imposed by colonial states without consulting the people. Now these same leaders were themselves imposing barriers between peoples. Echoing didactic texts used in schools in the region, Baraza recalled a historical past in which there was no distinction between Kenyans, Tanzanians and Ugandans.^{^[563]} The people of East Africa had mixed freely, on a basis of equality, and would do so again once the barriers put in their way by political leaders had been removed. For the editor of Baraza, it was only through creating a united East Africa that full independence would be achieved.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

NATION-STATES AND REGIONAL ORDERS

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