My next book project, Armed to the Teeth: Black Liberation and the Making of Africa’s Past, tells the interlinked stories of decolonization and the search for West Africa’s precolonial past. Why, in the 1960s-1970s, did research about West African history become central to struggles for decolonization, pan-Africanism, and Black liberation? What synergies and what tensions emerged from this dynamic? The book explores these question from the viewpoint of a variety of actors from around the Black world (novelists, musicians, Malian and Guinean state actors, archaeologists, UNESCO officials, as well as academic and non academic historians), who all, in one way or another, engaged West African history during this key era.
I’ve written or spoken about parts of this project here, here, and here.