History Hash Outs | Cairo and the African Revolution: The Making of an Anti-Colonial Hub

Join Sara Hussein, a history PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying intellectual and diplomatic history, for a talk adapted from her dissertation, which recovers Afro-Arab histories of political, cultural and intellectual exchange that thrived in mid-twentieth-century Cairo, when the city emerged as a global center fostering transnational cooperation across the formerly and still-colonized world.

Between 1954 and 1970, Cairo played a formative role in the development of Third Worldism and, specifically, as a site of African revolution, facilitated by both top-down and bottom-up practices that sometimes came to a head. This moment in modern Egyptian history, Hussein suggests, brought about national initiatives toward advancing a militant praxis of pan-Africanism constituted by material forms of solidarity while inaugurating institutional foundations upon which to build an African consciousness locally, sustained by burgeoning educational networks, circuits of intellectual exchange, modern media and an increasingly popular print culture. Combined, these efforts produced new forms of knowledge that advanced the anti-imperialist project in Afro-Asia. In this talk, Hussein provides an overview of Cairo's historical significance as a central node in the global network of pan-Africanist and Afro-Asianist thought that developed in the age of decolonization.

This research charts the largely overlooked terrain of transnational institutional and intellectual configurations of African and Afro-Arab anticolonial politics that were forged during this period, when a diverse range of political exiles from all corners of the African continent arrived in Egypt to advance their liberation struggles from their new Cairene headquarters. Using a range of archival materials and oral histories, Hussein shows how the emergence of this revolutionary hub was made possible by the strategic concentration of sociopolitical infrastructure, cultural institutions, media networks and material resources and was further shaped by the presence and anti-imperialist mobilization of African nationalists made up of political exiles, media workers, students, intellectuals and artists based in the country.