Beyond the Cold War and decolonization: Nigerian foreign policy, French nuclear tests, and the politics of independence in West Africa

As the first foreign policy issue Nigeria debated, the controversy around France’s nuclear tests, conducted in Algeria during the War of Independence there, allowed Lagos to rehearse its envisioned African role even before formal independence in October 1960. Nigerian opposition to France eventually culminated in the expulsion of the French ambassador on 5 January 1961, after the third French atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. This seemingly straightforward anti-colonial and anti-nuclear act was in fact largely driven by inter-African dynamics, particularly Nigeria’s complicated relationship with Ghana. By reconstructing this episode, the article demonstrates how international affairs uniquely crystallized interactions between domestic and regional politics in decolonizing states. This in turn encourages us to look beyond the paradigms of the Cold War and decolonization when writing the Global South into world history.