International Fascism and Imperialism in Africa during the Interwar and War Periods: Actors, Motivations and Goals

This paper revisits the history of black fascism and imperialism in Africa. It addresses the startling fact that many African actors in the interwar and war periods sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes and approaches of African resistance to European imperialism. This was because their motivations and goals clashed with the new orders projected by Japan, Italy, and Germany, which linked the possibility of internal, national change to the necessity for an external, imperial, and reorganization of the world. In all three countries, fascism, whether of the assimilationist or genocidal kind, recalled previous colonial experiences in Africa. As far as international fascism was concerned, the regimes in Tokyo, Rome, and Berlin invoked a redistribution of colonies as a measure that would guarantee the economic survival of their nations. Japan aimed to expand in Asia; Italians demanded a larger foothold in East Africa and, during the Second World War, in the Mediterranean; Nazi Germany earmarked eastern Europe. This explains why, Afro-fascist countries and movements in South Africa, Italian Libya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Egypt benefitted from international fascism by exploiting its weaknesses to negotiate for their independence from fascist dictators and regimes. The paper argues that mid twentieth -century imperialism and interwar fascism were interrelated strategies to harmonize the unstable relationship between Afro-fascist regimes and Axis powers. It reaffirms that imperialism and fascism exercised the highest degree of violence and had the most destructive impact on world history during the interwar and war periods. Through an examination of recent scholarship, this article offers a new conceptual interpretation of the link between fascism and imperialism. In so doing, it adds to our understanding of the interwar period by breaking down the neat boundaries between fascism and imperialism in Africa.