ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at what colonial subjects and sovereign nations in East and West Africa knew and thought about Nazism as an ideology; Hitler’s published and rhetorical denunciations of Africans and Jews as groups of people; and the rise of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany. It pays particular attention to the role that a secret military assistance from Adolf Hitler to Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, in 1934-35, may have played in Ethiopia’s silent reaction to Nazism compared to the open and clear critiques of that ideology from colonial subjects and the sovereign nation of Liberia. The chapter argues that there was initial admiration of Germany and German colonial rule in West and East Africa as a refreshing contrast to Britain’s and France’s colonial projects in the two regions. That admiration soon turned into anxiety as more Africans became acquainted with Nazism as a governing philosophy, Adolf Hitler’s racist views of Africans and Jews, and his ideas about white supremacy, colonialism and citizenship, in his book Mein Kampf. Reports of a possible return of former German colonies in Africa to Nazi Germany, and even cession of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Liberia to the Nazi state complicated these fears and shaped the responses of colonial subjects and the two sovereign nations in West and East Africa (Liberia and Ethiopia) to the Second World War.
