From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, “Africa for the Africans” was the banner under which a range of pan-Africanist imaginaries and political projects were articulated. This lecture by Professor Getachew charts the transformations of the idea of Africa for the Africans, examining in particular the shifting conceptions of “Africa” in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The Omar Azfar Lecture is an annual lecture series established in 2015 to honour the memory of Omar Azfar, who came to Balliol 1987 to read PPE. Omar became an economist and specialised in the field of crime and corruption. He was strongly committed to the ideal of social justice, and passed away in 2009. The lectures are funded thanks to generous benefactions from Old Members including Omar’s father, Kamal Azfar (Balliol 1958, Literae Humaniores) and his close College friends, most notably Jeremy Burchardt (Balliol, 1988, Modern History).

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her first book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019) reconstructs an account of self-determination offered in the political thought of Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century. The book won the Best Theory Book award of the International Studies Association in 2019, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book award of the National Council of Black Political Scientists in 2020.