Research Note: the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) Pamphlet Collection

ABSTRACT

During the decolonisation of southern Africa (1960s-1990s), several national liberation movements benefited from support from the Nordic countries, where they established foreign missions and mobilized international aid. As a result, a considerable amount of African primary source material has been amassed over the years. This material is now accessible through the Pamphlet Collection of the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI). The Pamphlet Collection contains over 700 boxes with (primary) source material from the entire African continent, including unique material from national liberation movements that is difficult to find elsewhere. Scholars of the Cold War can use this fascinating collection to study African agency during an era that – often wrongly - seemed to be dominated by Great Power competition. This Research Note explores contents of the Pamphlet Collection, with a particular focus on material from southern Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Southern Africa
• Nordic countries
• Decolonisation
• Cold War
• Liberation archives

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Åsa Lund Moberg for her support during my visit to Sweden and for her feedback on an earlier version of this article. Any errors in the text are entirely mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Tertit von Hanno Aasland, ‘The Nordic Countries and the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa’, Forum for Development Studies 29, no. 1 (2002): 211–35.

² http://www.liberationafrica.se (accessed May 25, 2022).

³ In addition to primary material, the collection also contains grey material and secondary material. The focus of this article, however, is on the former.

⁴ Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Blessing-Miles Tendi, ‘The Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements: An Introduction’, Journal of Southern African Studies 43, no. 1 (2017): 1–12.

⁵ George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar Es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974, African Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

⁶ And Zambia was ruled by UNIP in the first 27 years of independence.

⁷ Henning Melber, ‘From Liberation Movements to Governments: On Political Culture in Southern Africa’, African Sociological Review / Revue Africaine de Sociologie 6, no. 1 (2002): 161–72.

⁸ T. J. Stapleton and M. Maamoe, ‘An Overview of the African National Congress Archives at the University of Fort Hare’, History in Africa 25 (1998): 413–22; and M. C. Musambachime, ‘The Archives of Zambia’s United National Independence Party’, History in Africa 18 (1991): 291–6.

⁹ Alexander, McGregor, and Tendi, ‘The Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements’.

¹⁰ Terence Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 215–34.

¹¹ Gerald Chikozho Mazarire, ‘Rescuing Zimbabwe’s “Other” Liberation Archives’, in Documenting Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa, by Chris Saunders (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2010), 95–106.

¹² Chris Saunders, ‘Namibian Diplomacy Before Independence’, n.d., https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d58cea79-6a30-8fff-600d-4e17742f7c7d&groupId=252038.

¹³ W. Martin James, A Political History of the Civil War in Angola: 1974–1990 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011).

¹⁴ Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Allies in Adversity: The Frontline States in Southern African Security 1975–1993 (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007).

¹⁵ https://nai.uu.se/news-and-events/news/2017-08-24-unesco-project-documenting-liberation-struggle.html. (accessed May 30, 2022).