Preventive, pre-emptive, and educative: political literacy, anticommunism, and Cold War knowledge production in East Africa, 1949-1979

LoBue, Adam Joseph

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Description

Title

Preventive, pre-emptive, and educative: political literacy, anticommunism, and Cold War knowledge production in East Africa, 1949-1979

Author(s)

LoBue, Adam Joseph

Issue Date

2025-07-17

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Burton, Antoinette

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

• Brennan, James
• Burton, Antoinette

Committee Member(s)

• Barnes, Teresa
• Hunter, Emma

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• East Africa
• Cold War
• Anticommunism
• Propaganda
• Print Culture

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the intersection of print culture, politics, and the Cold War in twentieth-century East Africa, a bundle of interconnected ideas that I refer to as political literacy. East Africans were adamant about remaining outside of the Cold War and expressed a keen awareness of, and antipathy to, overt propaganda from all sides of the global conflict. For African readers to become literate in anticommunism, British propagandists thus first had to become literate in the vocabulary of African print culture, political aspirations and, more problematically, to know “the African mind” for the purpose of crafting texts appealing to African readers. I argue that British propagandists and African readers thus learned to make connections to Cold War themes through local idioms that had to be embedded in genres actively sought by African audiences. The desired result of these projects was to teach Africans to naturally see the world in Cold War terms and, in doing so, to generate Cold War knowledge through their own cultural production. As the following chapters show, however, racial bias and the exigencies of postcolonial statecraft meant British propagandists were often on the backfoot in trying to make sense of and manipulate reader preferences on the ground. The result is that much anticommunist output was imitative rather than innovative and open to creative misreading by Africans and Europeans alike. The dissertation offers an original intervention in scholarship on the Cold War in East Africa by bringing recent work on African print cultures into conversation with scholarship that overemphasizes the diplomatic, military, and economic realms of Africa’s Cold War engagements. Departing from the high diplomatic work and top-down perspective that dominates earlier scholarship on Africa’s Cold Wars, I instead focus on the agency of African subjects in shaping anticommunist print culture in the region not only as readers, but also as editors, translators, and bureaucrats whose creative appropriation of Cold War themes and texts was used to further their own social and political ends. Woven together through thematic case studies, the following chapters show how anticommunist work in East Africa was as much a process of psychological inquiry, market research, and public relations as it was political persuasion. The dialectical relationship between African readers and British propagandists reveals that the Cold War in East Africa was not only about people navigating political interests but also coming to terms with their own social and cultural positions in a period of rapid political transformation.

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130200

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Adam Joseph LoBue

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