Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonization in Southern Rhodesian Politics, 1950-1963

In this episode, our producer Anotida Chikumbu sits with Dr. Edward Brooks Marmon, a Post-doctoral scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, at the University of Pretoria prior to joining Mershon. His research focuses on pan-African diplomacy and transnational political networks in southern Africa, particularly colonial Zimbabwe. His academic and public scholarship has been widely disseminated, including in Cold War History, Journal of Southern African Studies, The Washington Post (Monkey Cage), and History Today, among many others. His revised doctoral dissertation, Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonization in Southern Rhodesian Politics, 1950-63, was published by Springer in 2023. Prior to his doctoral studies, Marmon was a development practitioner, focusing on higher education administration and governance in west Africa. He has consulted for the African Development Bank and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and previously worked for the American Political Science Association and the American Council on Education. He was a US Peace Corps volunteer in Niger and has also worked extensively in Liberia. He holds a MA and BA in history, both from Clark University. Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonization in Southern Rhodesian Politics, 1950-63 ( https://link.springer.com/book/10.100...) This book takes the transnational history of southern Africa’s liberation struggles in an innovative direction. It provides one of the first targeted studies of the manner in which the wider process of African decolonization shaped the political struggle for control of Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe). It offers an in-depth survey of the repercussions of pan-African developments on national-level political thought amidst one of the most seminal moments of the continent’s history. The book draws on over a year of fieldwork in southern Africa as well as archival collections in the USA and UK to explore the seismic re-alignments that occurred in the white settler dominated territory in southern Africa as self-determination became a widely accepted international principle virtually overnight. In particular, it focuses on the impact of decolonization struggles and/or independence in Ghana, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Malawi on Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. In so doing, it also offers new context on the roots of contemporary repression in Zimbabwe.