United Nations of Africa: Theories of Equality and Integration in the Horn

What positive role, if any, might nationalism play in post-colonial states? Scholars of postcolonial nationalism such as Mahmood Mamdani (2020), Manu Goswami (2004), and Partha Chatterjee (1986) have argued that nationalism contributes to the authoritarianism and ethnic violence of the post-colonial state. Other scholars like William Ackah (2016), Issa G. Shivji (2008), and Onyekachi Nnabuihe and Kayoke George (2021) argue that postcolonial nationalism prevents Third World states from cooperating and integrating to challenge the international economic order. This dissertation, by contrast, draws on original archival material in Eritrea, the UK, and the US to explore how activist groups across the Horn of Africa in the 1960s and 70s understood their “nationalist” projects as facilitating Pan-African integration and the construction of nonethnic states. I examine three types of nationalist projects in the Horn of Africa — national self-determination in Eritrea, national reunification in Somalia, and national identity development in Djibouti — to explore how visions and enactments of nationalism in the Horn of Africa functioned differently than scholars focused primarily on India and West, North, and South Africa have suggested. Through the study of activist and rebel groups' newsletters, booklets, memoranda, broadcasts, and speeches, I find that nationalists in Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti sought to construct nonethnic states of genuinely equal citizens and understood this task as requiring not only the depoliticization of ethnic identities but also addressing neo-imperialism, global economic inequality, linguistic inequality, elitism, and, in some cases, irredentism. I argue that postcolonial scholars do not sufficiently address these other significant problems that threaten the construction of ‘nonethnic’ states and that their proposals are thus insufficient for achieving genuine equality in the Third World. Further, I demonstrate that political groups across the Horn of Africa understood certain nationalist projects as promoting the seemingly incompatible end of facilitating Pan-African integration. Rather than viewing the ‘nation’ as an impediment to the realization of Pan-African unity, nationalists in the region viewed nations as powerful building blocks of an eventual ‘United Nations of Africa.’