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This chapter looks at climax of the 1960s apartheid debate. It focuses on the stakes of a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that pitted the African Group against Pretoria. Beneath the case’s surface—which revolved ostensibly around the question of whether South Africa’s World War I-era Mandate over South West Africa was still legitimate—lay a deeper debate about the meaning of the postcolonial Nation. For both African and Afrikaner nationalists, the court case was a way to legitimize their claims about nationhood—and to force Washington to pick a side in the postcolonial apartheid debate. Although opposed to U.N. action through the General Assembly, U.S. policymakers recognized that America’s status as a “postimperia”’ superpower rested partly on the credibility and authority of the ICJ. In 1966 the Court rejected the African Group’s case against South Africa, dealing African nationalists with a major blow.

This chapter is about the consequences of the 1966 ICJ ruling. It begins by outlining the impact of the decision within the African nationalist community. Backed into a corner by impatient liberation fighters and apathetic Western policymakers, the African Group responded to its defeat by unilaterally declaring South West Africa independent from South Africa, renaming the territory Namibia, and establishing a government-in-exile in New York. At the same time, within the United Nations, new groups began to reframe the critique against apartheid in non-nationalist terms and reach out to nongovernmental organizations. If the push for sanctions had stalled at the United Nations, it was necessary to lobby Washington at the grassroots level using more flexible discourses of human rights. In response, U.S. officials began to reassess their commitment to racial justice and liberal internationalism, and rollback their confrontational stance toward South Africa. By the end of the Johnson years, the United States had given up its campaign to change the apartheid status quo; all it wanted was to limit the unruliness of postcolonial politics.

This chapter examines the politics of the currency in West Africa from the beginning of the twentieth century. A public series of debates over the nature of the currency occurred in West Africa during both the colonial and independence periods. Since 1983, West African countries have been pioneers in Africa in developing new strategies to combat overvaluation of the currency and reduce the control of government over the currency supply. The chapter charts the evolution of West African currencies as boundaries and explores their relationship to state consolidation. It shows that leaders in African capitals managed to make the units they ruled increasingly distinct from the international and regional economies, but the greater salience of the currency did not end up promoting state consolidation. Rather, winning the ability to determine the value of the currency led to a series of disastrous decisions that severely weakened the states themselves.

The study of the British Empire in West Africa began before the birth of African history as an academic discipline. There were three major currents. The first was the literature generated by Europeans. The second current was the literature generated within West Africa, mainly by Arabic chroniclers and local historians such as Carl Reindorf of Ghana and Samuel Johnson of Nigeria. The third and least known current was the interest in West African history in the United States, due mainly to the activities of pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois. This chapter is concerned with the work of professional historians, and particularly with work since 1945. The three currents mentioned above led to the foundation for the post-Second World War creation of African history as an academic field. Four major themes dominate the historiography of British West Africa. In addition, the historiography of British West Africa over three generations is rich and vibrant and deserves to be celebrated.

This chapter shows that while promoting European colonies in the Americas, Atlantic contacts created cultural and economic opportunities for some coastal Africans. Although those in a position to benefit were fewer in number than those shipped into slavery from these shores and made up only a very small percentage of West Africa's population, their lives illuminate two important themes that deserve to be understood apart from the miseries of the slave trade and slavery. In the first place, their lives show that coastal West Africans were eager to participate in the Atlantic economy and succeeded in doing so effectively before, during, and after the transatlantic slave trade. The second theme of these early encounters, Africans's cultural discovery of Europe, also continued and expanded after 1800.

At the end of the 19th century, British rule in West Africa expanded far inland, from a few coastal outposts that were by-products of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition. The Imperial history of British West Africa can be read in terms of the tension and conflict arising from this enlargement of perspective, and the priorities which it entailed. The experiences of West Africa during 1900–30 and the 1930s–1960s are shown in this chapter. In the greater part of British West Africa, colonial rule lasted scarcely sixty years. It ended calmly: the transfer of power was effected by the same constitutional process of white settlement as in the Dominions. Throughout former British West Africa, representative government was in general retreat by the 1960s.

The attempt to establish plantation agriculture on the island of Bolama by British settlers in the early 1790s triggered a scramble for West Africa's resources in the Guinea Bissau region. The dispute and its eventual settlement in Portugal's favour in 1870 was to heighten the already tense Anglo-Portuguese relations as a result of the latter's resistance to the abolition of the slave trade. However, this territorial dispute has overshadowed the regional aspects of the island's settlement. Rather than being a mere object of European designs, the island was also the locus of rivalry between local trade lineages and African communities, and even the site of personal infighting due to their own particular dynamics. This chapter focuses on this local and regional momentum that continued regardless of the broader conflict, involving slaves, freed slaves, Christianised Africans, African migrants and trader-planters, producing distinct patterns of settlement and crop cultivation.

Thousands are making a mass exodus from West Africa. Attempting to escape perpetual unemployment in their home countries, many are taking drastic measures to reach Spain or other European nations for the promise of better economic conditions. Most die in rough seas, as they travel with human traffickers in pateras, small fishing boats ill equipped for the journey. On a catamaran, fourteen Senegalese Muslim men made an unprecedented Atlantic voyage bound for New York, and they made it, but just barely. Within the larger context of West African Muslim immigration, this chapter discusses the perilous odyssey of these Muslim sailors, the push of their familial obligations, and the pull of the American dream.

This is the second of two chapters establishing the legal status of those territories where ITA projects have occurred, covering (mostly non-state) territories where the international legal right to self-determination was, in varying ways, determinative of this status. Before commencing the analysis on each territory, a review of the international law on self-determination and a consideration of the effect that the self-determination entitlement is regarded to have on territorial status is offered. This general legal framework is then applied to the question of the status of each territory: Mandated and Trust territories where the UN conducted consultations; West Irian in 1962-63; South West Africa/Namibia in 1967 and 1989-90; the Western Sahara from 1991; and East Timor between 1999 and 2002. The conclusion reached is that these territories were not ‘sovereign UN territories’ but rather non-state territories with distinct legal personality derived from their self-determination entitlement.