The Global 1960s

Convention, contest and counterculture

Tamara Chaplin, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138709485
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351780216
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Global 1960s presents compelling narratives from around the world in order to de-center the roles played by the United States and Europe in both scholarship on, and popular memories of, the sixties.

Geographically and chronologically broad, this volume scrutinizes the concept of "the sixties" as defined in both Western and non-Western contexts. It provides scope for a set of analyses that together span the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Written by a diverse and international group of contributors, chapters address topics ranging from the socialist scramble for Africa, to the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, global media coverage of Israel, Cold War politics in Hong Kong cinema, sexual revolution in France, and cultural imperialism in Latin America.

The Global 1960s explores the contest between convention and counter-culture that shaped this iconic decade, emphasizing that while the sixties are well-known for liberation, activism, and protest against the establishment, traditional hierarchies and social norms remained remarkably entrenched. Multi-faceted and transnational in approach, this book is valuable reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century global history.

1

The politics of colonial history

Bourguiba, Senghor, and the student movements of the global 1960s

Burleigh Hendrickson

While the events of France’s revolutionary moment of May 1968 have been well documented, related political activism in former colonial possessions in Africa like Tunisia and Senegal represent far less researched terrain.¹ Like France, during May 1968 campuses at the Universities of Tunis and Dakar erupted in protest—in March in Tunis and in late May in Dakar. In Tunis, students expressed solidarity with young Tunisian activists who had been incarcerated for staging a pro-Palestinian demonstration in June 1967.² Meanwhile, state cuts to student funding at the University of Dakar led to a campus-wide protest that, as in France, ultimately precipitated a parallel workers’ strike. This chapter explores how agents of the state and student protestors resurrected colonial history to negatively depict each other. In both cases, campuses were closed down and students sent home with varying degrees of force. And in both cases a war of words ensued between protestors and the state over the authentic meanings of revolution, neo-imperialism, and mimicry, and, more importantly, over the very events of 1968 themselves. In addition to revealing a broader moment of global protest beyond France’s borders, these cases also speak to important shared colonial histories linking them to France and to the global 1960s.

Rather fittingly (given France’s intellectual predilections), in February 1968 on the eve of France’s May events, the French New Left philosopher, Louis Althusser, declared philosophy to be a revolutionary weapon. In an interview with the Italian journalist, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Althusser noted the violent potential of ideas that, “in political, ideological and philosophical struggle, [are] also weapons, explosives or tranquilizers and poisons. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word.”^2,3 Philosophy was indeed deployed as a weapon in 1968 when a number of Althusser’s students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm participated in protests at Parisian universities and surrounding factories, with New Left and Maoist ideas providing the theoretical bases for their political activity. Drawing inspiration from Althusser’s 1968 commentary, this chapter examines how colonial history was similarly used in 1968 as an ideological and political weapon by both the state and protesting students in their struggles to control postcolonial university campuses in Africa. While a brief summation of the 1968 protests in Tunisia and Senegal is necessary, this essay is more interested in the ways in which colonial history was mobilized in the discursive battles that followed, than it is in the events themselves. The focus on the Francophone world draws attention to its important place in the global constellation of activism of this period. This approach further underscores the power of ideas and, in particular, the power of colonial historical memory as a key element in the global 1960s.

March 1968 in Tunis and May–June 1968 in Dakar

Given Tunisia and Senegal’s deep colonial ties to France, it is perhaps no surprise that their colonial histories played such a key role in the upheaval of 1968. Though French presence in Senegal dates to at least the seventeenth century, when Gorée Island acted as an important hub in the French slave trade, it was not until 1895 that the French established the Government General of French West Africa (AOF). From 1895 to 1956, the Government General oversaw an area nine times the size of France, consisting of present-day Mauritania, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Benin.⁴ Senegal had long held a special place in the French colonial hierarchy, with the four communes of Senegal acting as the only regions of the AOF in which French citizenship was possible—though rarely granted—and providing the seat of colonial government in the port cities of Saint Louis and later Dakar. Like the AOF, Tunisia was part of France’s “second overseas empire” as it expanded in the nineteenth century after territorial losses in North America and the Caribbean.⁵ While Algeria was administered as part of France itself after 1848, the French colonial regime instituted protectorates in neighboring regions of North Africa, namely Morocco and Tunisia, in the 1880s.

Throughout the colonial period, subjects in North and West Africa routinely challenged French rule either through claims to additional rights or direct calls to independence. Future presidents of postcolonial Tunisia (Habib Bourguiba) and Senegal (Léopold Sédar Senghor) shared many similarities as both beneficiaries and victims of the French colonial system. On the one hand, the French government funded both men’s educations at prestigious French schools in the interwar period, where Bourguiba sharpened his political views as a law student at the Sorbonne, and Senghor studied literature and linguistics at the University of Paris and the École pratique des hautes études. On the other hand, Bourguiba and Senghor both faced financial hardship and racism as colonial students in Paris, which no doubt contributed to a hardening of their anti-colonial positions. While Bourguiba expressed ardent demands for Tunisian independence as early as the 1920s, Senghor’s politicization was much more gradual, even advocating for an African federation under the umbrella of France as late as the 1950s.⁶ With France distracted by its bloody conflict with Algeria (1954–1962), Bourguiba finally secured Tunisian independence in 1956. Two years later, France at last acknowledged the eventual independence of “Black Africa” when the French Community extended citizenship to subjects in the AOF. After a failed federation with Mali in 1959, Senghor became president of independent Senegal in September 1960. The euphoria of independence was brief, however. By 1968, citizens of these new nations had ample time to evaluate their progress, and university students often served as mouthpieces of dissent against leadership.

In March 1968, the University of Tunis erupted in protest over the sentencing of student activist Mohamed Ben Jennet to 20 years of forced labor. Along with others, Ben Jennet had protested Bourguiba’s failure to denounce Israeli aggression in the Arab–Israeli conflict, and was later scapegoated as the leader of the movement.⁷ Though the Bourguiba regime insisted that Ben Jennet had orchestrated the June upheaval, in actuality, Ben Jennet was but one member of a growing New Left activist group, Perspectives, which had organized a rally outside of the American and British embassies. The demonstration degenerated into vandalism for which Ben Jennet was later blamed and, after the incident, Perspectives became a common target of media attacks by Bourguiba’s Destourian Socialist Party (PSD).⁸ Founded in 1963 by figures such as Mohamed Charfi and Gilbert Naccache while studying in Paris, Perspectives was originally designed to comment on Tunisian politics and society through the intellectual critique of its journal, Perspectives tunisiennes. In 1964 the group shifted its center of activity to Tunis, and began to explore more direct actions like the June 1967 demonstration.

Ben Jennet’s severe sentence set in motion a student-driven movement for his liberation. In early March, supporters collected more than 1,300 signatures in a petition demanding his release. By 15 March, a crowd of more than 2,000 students at the University of Tunis had gathered to declare solidarity with Ben Jennet, denounce Bourguiba’s neo-imperialism, and demand education reforms. Tunisian students and sympathizers living in Paris weighed in on events taking place in Tunis by staging demonstrations in the metropole. These continued throughout the rest of the year as Bourguiba set up a Special Court back in Tunis to try more than 200 arrested students for crimes against the state, with more than 80 convicted in September show trials, where some received sentences of more than 16 years.⁹ As we shall see, in the aftermath of these tumultuous events, Tunisian activists recalled French colonial history to decry the injustices of their postcolonial present.

In Senegal, rising education costs and state revenue reductions related to low peanut-crop yields prompted the Senegalese Commission on Higher Education to cut student scholarships in October 1967. Monthly stipends would be reduced to either two thirds or one half, and they would no longer be distributed over 12 months, but over ten instead. When confronted directly by leaders from the Democratic Union of Senegalese Students (UDES), university officials argued that several other African nations had made similar cuts without protest from students.¹⁰ After a brief period of unproductive negotiations with the office of the Minister of National Education, UDES (with the backing of the larger Dakar Student Union (UED), a body that included non-Senegalese African students) called for an unlimited strike of exams and classes on 27 May.¹¹

In response to the strike, Senegal’s President, the award-winning poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, ordered the paramilitary Special Armed Forces onto campus to break up the masses of students.¹² Students reported that there were no university or government representatives on hand with which to negotiate—having been convoked by Senghor during the invasion—and at 10:30am on 29 May, Senegal’s fiercest fighting forces breached the sacred university grounds to disperse protestors. The clashes on 29 May resulted in 800 arrests, 70 injured students, and the death of one protestor.¹³ Following the fighting, between 400 and 500 students were sent to military camps in Archinard. Senghor announced publicly on 30 May that the university would be closed indefinitely. He also expelled 48 student union leaders from the university for having protested, and forced the expatriation of foreign participants.

After news of campus violence spread, Senegal’s largest labor union joined the students in calling for a general strike on 30 May 1968. The government ordered police to occupy its headquarters (Bourse du Travail) in Kaolack and Dakar and sent a number of detained leaders to military camps in Dodji. Police statistics show wide participation outside of Dakar, leading the Senghor regime to release all detainees from military camps in June and ultimately grant a 15 percent increase in minimum wages.¹⁴ Senghor’s initial use of force can be explained in part by his fear that striking students were eroding the very education system into which he had invested so much (20 percent of the state budget in 1967), and one that he believed would lead to the modernization of Senegal.¹⁵ A seemingly simple budgetary act regarding scholarship reductions—that had been passed at other regional African universities—had not only placed the fate of higher education in the balance, it had fomented unrest in labor sectors beyond Dakar and, as Senghor stated privately, “called into question the existence of the Senegalese state.”¹⁶

Senghor and neo-imperialism

In the days that followed a military intervention at the University of Dakar on 31 May 1968, President Senghor announced over national public radio that Senegalese protestors were simply imitating their French counterparts. And, indeed, it is true that the disruptions on Parisian campuses at Nanterre and the Sorbonne had taken place nearly a month before the clashes in Dakar. In the larger debate over the meaning of the protests, the state narrative that emerged involved common references to its former colonial oppressor. And in an August speech given during a visit to Paris, Senghor declared that “if there hadn’t been a May crisis in France, there would not have been one in Senegal.”¹⁷ Fueling already hostile Senegalese public opinion toward the French after about 300 years of colonial domination, Senghor drew a causal relationship between the Senegalese student movement and the nation’s former French oppressors. Because of his torn relationship to France and French culture, however, Senghor seemed reticent to take his charge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The politics of colonial history: Bourguiba, Senghor, and the student movements of the global 1960s
• 2 Unity and conflict in the socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970
• 3 “We shall create a New World, a New Man, a New Society”: Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites
• 4 Challenging British sovereignty: Transnational activism and political power in Northern Ireland, 1963–1973
• 5 Social science, cultural imperialism, and the Ford Foundation in Latin America in the 1960s
• 6 The global erotics of the French sexual revolution: Politics and “Arab Men” in post-decolonization France, 1962–1974
• 7 Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968
• 8 Refashioning Spain: Fashion, consumer culture, gender, and international integration under the late Franco dictatorship
• 9 Hong Kong at the movies: Cold war masculinity, action melodrama and sixties martial arts films
• 10 Artists’ networks in the 1960s: The case of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (Mexico City, 1962–1969)
• 11 “Kill that gook, you gook”: Asian Americans and the Vietnam War
• 12 The export of Zionism?: Global images of Israel in the 1960s
• 13 Looking out, cheering on: Global leftist vocabularies among Palestinian citizens of Israel
• 14 Herbert Marcuse: Media and the making of a cultural icon
• Index