SUMMARY:

This essay reexamines debates on pan-African federation through the political thought of Kwame Nkrumah and his critics, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Abubakar Balewa. It illustrates that competing accounts of the limits of postcolonial sovereignty propelled alternative visions of regional integration. While Nkrumah’s thesis of neocolonialism, which centered on the economic dependence of nominally independent postcolonial states, grounded a model of centralized federation, the concerns of Azikiwe and Balewa with internal instability and fragmentation motivated a regional union that reinforced the principles of nonintervention and territorial integrity. Although these were competing models of regionalism, they illustrate that federation was not always posed as an alternative to national sovereignty, but was instead viewed by West African nationalists as a mechanism for securing the fragile independence of postcolonial states. In this regard, the African debate about postcolonial regional federation emerged as a critique of and alternative to imperial federation. By expanding our sense of the projects pursued during decolonization’s “federal moment,” this essay urges an approach to the study of federation that views it not as a static and stable institution with a fixed set of meanings, but as one that could be repurposed and remade for a variety of political ends.