Globalising Lusophone Africa’s Independence Struggles: Identities, Ideologies, and Networks

Lusophone Africa has been neglected in Anglophone historiography. With the exceptions of a narrow set of episodes, figures, and interpretations, all of which appear in a fragmented set of journal articles, its struggles against Portuguese colonialism have remained outside the grand narratives of decolonisation.

In this open access book, a group of established and up-and-coming historians of Lusophone Africa bring much-needed coherence to this interconnected set of anti-colonial struggles in order to show how people and ideas from these countries crossed borders around the globe. Its international team of contributors draws on a an underutilized range of source material beyond the usual Western state archives in order to cover a wide geographic scope, from North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia, all while critically examining the consequences of such international connections within the Lusophone states themselves.

For its empirically rich, original contributions to the grand narratives of African independence struggles, this book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in African history, decolonization, and the Cold War, and it is of keen interest to anyone interested in alternative histories of decolonization.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Natalia Telepneva is Lecturer in International History at University of Strathclyde, UK. She is the author of Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and Collapse of Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 (2022) and co-editor of Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (I.B Tauris, 2018).

Rui Lopes is Lecturer in Contemporary History at Birkbeck University, UK, and NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal. He is the author of West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship, 1968-1974: Between Cold War and Colonialism (2014).