REFRAMING THE NARRATIVE: AFRICA'S TRANSNATIONAL REAWAKENING AND THE SHATTERING OF HISTORICAL AMNESIA (1960S-2010S WEST AFRICA AND ITS DIASPORA)
Keywords:
Africa, Transnationalism, African diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Historical amnesia, Post-colonial theory, Global AfricanityAbstract
Africa’s post-independence history has often been narrated through Eurocentric, crisis-centred, and state-failure frameworks that marginalise African and diasporic agency. This narrative review reframes that historiography by examining Africa’s transnational reawakening from the 1960s to the 2010s, with a particular focus on West Africa and its diaspora in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, the review interrogates the production of historical amnesia and demonstrates how African political, intellectual, cultural, and economic networks have persistently shaped global processes despite periods of disruption and silencing. Using a narrative review methodology approach, the study synthesises literature across three interconnected phases: post-independence Pan-African mobilisation and global Black solidarity in the 1960s–1970s; fragmentation under neoliberal restructuring and Afro-pessimist discourses in the 1980s–1990s; and reawakening through digital transnationalism, cultural soft power, and renewed diaspora engagement in the 2000s–2010s. The analysis reveals enduring continuity in people-centred transnational agency, even when state-led initiatives weakened. By foregrounding memory, identity, and power, the review challenges linear decline narratives and reframes Africa as an ideational and cultural actor in global history. In doing so, it contributes to the decolonisation of African and diaspora historiography and offers a more inclusive understanding of Africa’s place in the world.References
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