Writing Africa under the Cold War: Arrested Decolonisation and Geopolitical Integration

In a 2000 interview, novelist Ahmadou Kourouma notes the correspondence between the dawning of the Cold War and the development of independence movements across Africa. For Kourouma, the former is notable for its strategic positioning of newly independent African nations as allies aligned to one or other of the superpowers in a relationship that he characterises as a new imperialism. Reading novels from West, Central and East Africa, including work by Kourouma, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o and Alain Mabanckou, this chapter traces the ways in which literary writing has articulated the tensions accompanying this intertwined relationship between arrested decolonisation, post-independence malaise and the subjugation of the continent within the matrix of the Cold War.