The three Nordic Truth and Reconciliation Commissions TRCs (in Norway, Finland, Sweden) working with Sámi issues each emphasize the importance of assuming historical responsibility. These TRC processes are in many way progressive in their decolonizing aims, and based on the wishes of the Sámi parliaments of each country. However, the mandates are closely connected to the (nation) states and current national borders. This risks leading to a presentist perspective on Sámi history, where certain Sámi groups that do not fit in nicely in the current patterns of “national histories” are forgotten, as are the questions related to historical responsibility for and regarding these groups. This paper looks at this issue, studying the mandates and reports of the TRCs. It offers perspectives for ways around this case of methodological nationalism. The paper thus touches on several of the themese of the CfP for the conference, including Nordic colonialism, global history and decoloniality, ethical aspects of global (public) history, methodological nationalism, indigenous perspectives and national history.

Since the beginning of his first five-year term, French President Emmanuel MACRON has initiated a policy of reconciliation about colonial Algeria (1830-1962), believing that this past divided French Society and damaged relationship with Algeria. He has officially acknowledged some dramas experienced by adversary memory groups with the guiding principle “No to repentance, yes to recognition”. We thus present an analysis of how memorial associations of each side (colonialist and anti-colonial associations based in France) perceive the memorial policy of President MACRON. What do they enjoy or reject in this policy of reconciliation and for which reasons? Were they asked to participate in the development of this policy? What are their expectations? What are their demands for material and symbolic recognition? How do they mobilize for the defense of their claims? Who are their supporters in political French arena? This study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with leaders of memorial associations (such as the associations The Cercle Algerianiste ou Coup de Soleil).

In 1962, the first International Congress of Africanists took place in Accra, Ghana. About 500 scholars attended the event, travelling from Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, the US, France, Kenya, the USSR, or China. The Ford Foundation, the governments of Nigeria and Ghana, and the UNESCO financed most of the initiative, while sources report that the idea originated from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The organising committee, made up of representatives from several African universities, as well as British, Soviet, American and French institutions, chose English and French as the languages of communication. In the wake of the African independence movements, the International Congress of Africanists constituted a key platform for the contestation and renegotiation of the role of science during and after decolonisation. The presentation will aim to present the debates and actors that shaped these transformations, focusing in particular on how African scholars sought to (re)define global scholarly codes of conduct for the production of knowledge on and in Africa (1962-1991). The analysis will be based on scholarly journals, proceedings, and archives related to the Accra congress and the five subsequent congresses in Dakar (1967), Addis Ababa (1973), Kinshasa (1978), Ibadan (1985), and Khartoum (1991).

The history of Tanzania, particularly in the socialist era, occupies a central place within scholarship on Africa and the global 1960s. The country’s first president, Julius Nyerere, was a leading figure
of African decolonization, and by the end of the 1960s through the 1970s Tanzania was the most significant African hub for Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, African liberation struggles, agrarian socialism, and Third World Leftist thought. Through the 1970s figures as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Mao Zedong, and Angela Davis visited Tanzania or met with Nyerere and hailed the importance Tanzania’s project of African socialism, known as Ujamaa. A range of books which have noted the importance of Tanzania as a diplomatically-sophisticated Third World state, central hub for Black and Pan-African thought, and experiment in agrarian indigenous anti-capitalism, centering on Tanzania’s prominent roles in the NIEO, OAU, Non-Aligned Movement, and host of the 6th Pan-African Congress. However, postcolonial Tanzania stands out on the African continent for more than for its involvement in international organizations and movements. By the 1980s, the global commodity crisis that had emerged from the oil crisis had served, in tandem with other endogenous and exogenous factors, to immiserate Tanzania’s economy. In the aftermath of economic collapse, Tanzania became one of the first countries to resist and then eventually adopt an IMF SAP. My work extends the body of recent work on Ujamaa by analyzing both the transitions to and away from socialism, through the recommodification of land as leveraged by international private debt ownership. I argue that Ujamaa cannot be properly understood without understanding its dissolution, and that its destruction is a singularly instructive case for understanding the global scale of neoliberalism as an imperial tradition that prefigures contemporary environmental liberalisms. By tracing international debt that bridges the financial space between the Global North and Africa, I am able to better integrate these two sets of literatures. In actual practice, this entails tracing the paper trail of money generated by sovereign, parastatal, and small-scale debt, into the abstracted role of finance and following
its exchange to other financialized nodes and return to the form of private use of public land in post-agrarian socialist Tanzania. Braiding these strands, I argue that understanding the international legacy of Tanzania’s role as a diplomatic hub requires a return to histories of small scale agrarian life read through a lens of global
political economy.