This book provides a forum for intellectual exchange around the connections between nationalism and power in Africa, with Africa viewed as a global presence. Various chapters explore aspects of the colonial order, the nature of change and of agencies within a comparative perspective.

Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa also interrogates African modernity and how it is constructed and articulated in comparison to other modernities. The chapters move from localism to globalism, and through various ideas and analyses we see modern Africa in a nuanced manner, a continent that is capable of accepting other cultures and traditions without losing all of its indigenous beliefs and values.

The book exposes the power of traditions to reshape history, creating in different parts of the African diaspora the ideas to redefine lives and spaces and struggles to create a new future. Africans, like others, have their own ideas and constructions of modernity and modernism. They have, as the various contributions to this volume have amply demonstrated, staged modernity on their own terms, and in the process recast it in their own image.