1950s: (A Time of Contrasts — Heightened Internal Conflict Coexisting with Extraordinary Optimism, the Birth of African History as a Scholarly Discipline wit…

1950s: (A Time of Contrasts — Heightened Internal Conflict Coexisting with Extraordinary Optimism, the Birth of African History as a Scholarly Discipline with Kenneth O. Dike’s 1950 PhD Using Oral Traditions, African Literature’s Emergence with Camara Laye and Chinua Achebe, and the Twilight of Colonial Rule as a Moment When Many Things Seemed Possible Even as Pre-Colonial Dynamics Resurfaced): The late 1940s and 1950s was a period of contrasts — heightened internal conflict and competition as ethnic, cultural, and regional groupings consolidated and sought to dominate the nationalist struggle, many of these rivalries dating to the nineteenth century and now morphing into new forms of competition for the political space to be inherited from colonial regimes. Yet the 1950s was also an era of extraordinary optimism and vitality — for ideas about pan-Africanism and the continent’s intrinsic unity, characterized by an increasingly assertive self-confidence. This was reflected in an intellectual and artistic renaissance: African history was born as a distinct scholarly discipline when the Nigerian Kenneth O. Dike was awarded a PhD by King’s College London in 1950, the first achieved using oral traditions as the basis for historical research. In literature, Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart dealt with romanticized notions of a lost pre-colonial past and represented new strains of cultural resistance to Western hegemony. In the twilight of colonial rule many things seemed possible, even as the dirt of political struggle gathered in the engines of change. The time of Dike’s doctorate and Achebe’s first novel was also the time of hardening race laws in South Africa, violent insurgency in Lusophone Africa and Belgian Congo, and brutal wars in Algeria and Kenya — a combination of evolving internal conflict and botched decolonization that would facilitate the resurgence of militarized governance and ferocious competition for resources that had characterized Africa’s nineteenth century.