Violence and the self-fashioning of liberation

An author cannot know the events that their book will be read alongside.In October 2023, when I was three chapters into Spear and Landau had compellingly set out the conditions in which ANC "took up the spear" after half a century of pursuing nonviolent methods, Hamas carried out violent attacks in Israel.I was not necessarily preoccupied with historical parallels or lessons from the past.Instead, the high stakes of the narratives built around violence during its unfolding and in its aftermath seemed clearer than ever, especially as Western states worked to legitimize Israel's (violent) military response.I felt disarmed by my inability to shake off the absorbing story of Mandela and the revolutionaries (and an absorbing story it certainly is) while I followed events in Palestine and Israel, oscillating (probably like other scholars external to the situation) between the necessity and the uselessness of scholarly analysis in times of mass despair.Perhaps all the more so because I was reading and am writing (a month later) in Dar es Salaam, set apart from my usual environment of discussing current affairs and instead doing so in halting Swahili at newspaper stands, in a city that still prides itself on its history of hosting exiled liberation movements.If I were I to read Mao's On Guerilla Warfare today, like Mandela did in Johannesburg around 1960, I considered, we would hardly have read the same book at all.This context explains why my reflections on Spear turn to the historical method and the role of the historian.Nevertheless, I read the book not as an expert of violence, terrorism, or revolution but instead as a historian of the era of decolonization in East and Central Africa, notably in countries which obtained flag independence without large-scale armed insurgency, during the same years of the early 1960s that Landau focuses on in his book. 1 I would like, then, to situate Spear within recent historiography on African decolonization, and in particular to use the provocations Landau makes regarding methodology to ask where we can go next with certain