Rethinking the late colonial state in Africa through diplomatic training

This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states. Drawing on archives in France, the UK, and the US, as well as a newly recorded oral history interview with one of the first cohort of Ghanaian trainees, we focus on the development of diplomatic training from ad hoc responses to requests to a more formalised programmes provided by imperial powers and the United States, and tensions and competition between providers and over the content of the courses. We focus primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, contextualised within wider experiences of African colonies in both the British and French empires. We demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state.